Camping

It's birthday season -- two of the kids have birthdays in October, right around school holidays -- and the middle child, who is turning 16, wanted to go camping for her birthday. With boys.

Now, frankly, I'm not sure she'd know what to do with a boy.  She goes to an all-girls school and all her male friends are "nice Jewish boys."  The closest she has ever come to having a boyfriend was when she was 12 she announced on Monday she was dating a boy, and on Wednesday announced they had broken up.  She said she couldn't understand why people on TV make such a fuss about it.

So we were ok with the camping and with the boys -- we would still chaperone, of course -- so she went and told all her friends we were going camping on October 6.  Two of her friends in Auckland booked flights and all of her friends in Wellington told her they couldn't come that weekend.

So somehow the plan got changed that we would go camping with her Auckland friends this weekend and her Wellington friends in two weeks time. In hindsight we should have just let her go with her friends, but instead we told the other two kids they could invite a friend.  We ended up with eight kids, four tents, and making half the kids take the train to the campsite while we transported the luggage.

I should also note that on Friday night, when we should have been getting prepared, we hosted a dinner party.  To be fair, it had been on the books since before the camping trip, but again in hindsight we should have cancelled it as the house was a disaster area of tents, sleeping bags, pillows, etc.  I also got stuck at work finishing a report so I arrived *after* the guests.

I'd like to say when they left, we got busy loading the car, but in reality we just had an argument over something silly, and I went to bed.  It didn't really matter much because we couldn't load the car -- we needed to transport five kids to synagogue on Saturday morning.  It was the anniversary of the middle child's bat mitzvah, and she not only wanted to read from the Torah, but to also be the cantor that day.  (She did it beautifully.)  Her mom led the service and I gave the drasha (sermon) so it was a real family affair.

I should note that at her bat mitzvah three years ago, she'd given the drasha and I still had a copy, so I read it -- word for word.  Expressing all my hopes and aspirations for starting high school in 2016, the rest of the congregation were a bit confused, especially because the cantor was laughing her head off. 

So we didn't even start loading the car until 1pm in the afternoon.  Gratefully, the weather couldn't have been nicer, the campsite was only 45 minutes away and all the kids pitched in, so by 4pm we were set up and enjoying a (very) late lunch.  A friend who lived nearby came over, and in the evening I dropped him at home and picked up ten pizzas from Domino's, so everyone was happy.

The campsite had strict rules to vacate by 11am but we weren't even out of our tents at 10am. It was overcast and cool and the kids were whining about going home, so I was getting pretty annoyed. However, the sun finally burned off the haze and it turned into a glorious beach day, and the campsite was only 100 yards from the beach.  The kids made pancakes and packed up the tents (somewhat grudgingly) and we finally left the campground at about 1pm, parked the car on the street and parked ourselves on a picnic blanket for the next two hours.

The eldest child was supposed to be in Auckland for two back-to-back seminars, one on leadership and the other on her gap-year program in Israel.  For some reason she decided not to go to the first one, and so was going to fly on Monday to attend the second one.  We pointed out we were working on Monday and she'd have to take the bus to the airport.  Now, it's 8 miles from our house to the airport and there's a bus that runs practically the entire way (it's about ten minutes of walking) so this wasn't some fantastic hardship.  She contacted the organisers and got them to put her on a Sunday flight instead.

So at 3pm we had to leave the gorgeous beach, drive an hour to the airport, quickly drop the luggage on our front porch, drop off two of the kids, drive 45 minutes back to the campsite to pick up the remaining kids, and come home.  I remember my dad doing such crazy things when I was a child and I thought about the circle of life, and how some things never change. I had a lot of time to think over those three hours.

Finally we were home, exhausted, with four children who were badly sunburned because they didn't have the sense to re-apply sunscreen every two hours. (New Zealand has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world so kids are taught from preschool about applying sunscreen, and they still don't listen.) They'd also bought into the myth that apple cider vinegar cures everything, including sunburn, so the middle child took a bottle up to her room to apply it.  To her credit, she did have the sense to think pouring apple cider vinegar onto a washcloth in her room might be a bad idea; however, her solution was to open a window and pour apple cider vinegar onto a washcloth outside.  She dropped the bottle, which fell two stories and smashed on the front porch where all of the camping gear was still sitting.

So now the gear is still sitting on the front porch, waiting for the smell of apple cider vinegar to dissipate.  Hopefully it will be gone by the time we next take the kids camping, in two weeks...