So, in the grand life of mommyhood, I haven’t had time to breathe let alone write! Now that I have a few quiet moments with the baby napping, the preschooler happily reading quietly after her first day of school and the second grader at Grandma’s; I will tell you about Day/Night 2 of the Float Trip. The morning started out pretty hectically. For some reason, we parents decided after our late night it would be just fine to get up at 9am to cook breakfast and get ready for our canoe trip which was booked for 10:30am. Mothers of the world cringe, yes, we admit it….it was not our smartest moment as mommies. LOL
If you remember from Night 1, we could not get firewood, so while the guys went to get some; we tried to at least get coffee going on the little propane grill and get all the eggs, bacon, sausage and pancakes ready to throw on the fire. Much to our surprise the morning fire was an epic FAIL. Eventually everything was cooked on the propane grill and we threw kids and men food quickly before rushing them to get changed for the canoe trip. Then we realized in our haste to get everything covered from the rain the night before we had mixed up everything we had brought for the canoe ride with everything else we brought. Sigh! Insert a bunch of expletives here and skip to the canoe ride.
My girls were not very impressed at all with the canoe for about the first hour and a half of the ride. We were on the 9 mile Ho Hum trip and about a half mile in Braeleigh announced that she was ready to get out and go home. Fabulous. However, once we started letting the girls switch canoes so that no kids had to ride alone for very long, they were more into it. Especially because Gillian’s friend Montana was way more into it and that spiked the girls’ enthuasiasm. Everything went pretty well on our first big stop, the guys found a small pond up the beach and they took the girls to explore. We ate lunch before taking off again and the girls had finally decided that this whole canoe thing might be pretty cool. The water too, except for when Brae had to touch ‘seaweed’ or Gillian saw minnows.
We found the minnow thing out the hard way….. Gillian decided right after we passed by a perfectly good beach that she had to pee NOW! Brae had gone in the canoe with Montana and her parents, so I had plenty of patience to be ornery. I threw her on into the water and told her to go and her Dad hopped out to help her get back in when she was ready. That’s when she saw the minnows. She ran up the rocks and hung on the tree roots sticking out of the wall of dirt she was up against. Now I would have been more concerned about snakes in the tree branches hanging down, but she was not. Those minnows were gonna eat her alive though. After several minutes of screaming and her Dad and I insisting she swim back over to the canoe, I lost that patience and paid for it dearly. I let her Dad get back in the boat and I jumped out to get her. I still can’t figure out why my strong 6 foot tall man could not do this, but I grabbed her off the dirt wall, walked with her through the minnows as she screamed and put her back in the canoe. Now here comes the payback…..my barely 5 foot 6 inches self could not get back in! Needless to say, I rode the next ¼ mile on the outside of the boat through a nice deep part of the river full of slimy things swimming around my tummy and legs. At one point one of those slimy things went up the leg of my capris and I swore to Gillian if it was a snake she was in sooooo much trouble! (Don’t worry it was just algae or ‘seaweed’ as Brae called it.)
The rest of the canoe trip was pretty uneventful until the very end. Gillian got over her fear of minnows when Montana got out of the boat and was playing in them. Braeleigh decided ‘seaweed’ around her feet wasn’t so bad since Mommy had had some in her pants. At the end of the trip, my fiancee and I ended up in our canoe alone. Apparently that was not a smart idea for me, since without the girls he was way less careful and flipped us. Boooooo on him! Not only was it not the hilarious experience he thought it would be, we lost all our stuff and the canoe decided to bash me in the noggin. So that made for a short night……for me anyway. We went back to camp, grilled steaks and corn on the cob for dinner. (so freaking yummy!) I headed off to the tent to go to bed with the girls soon after that….
The intensity of the storm came and went. It came down drizzly at first then in sheets then drizzles…you get the point. So we were all piled in the sleeping tent, which we had made into a nice big bed by inflating three blow-up mattresses and placing them side by side across the entire tent. It was hot because we had to keep the windows covered and put extra tarps on to insure that none of us inside got wet. We had fun though just chatting and playing with the kids. Suddenly, mid-downpour, our 7 year olds decided they had to pee. Lovely. Why couldn’t the patrolmen come by after it started raining; now the potty tent was across on the other campsite? So, I dug out the ponchos I had packed and the guys braved the storm to take the poncho-covered children to potty. Our friends’ daughter peed and they headed back, no big deal. Not my daughter. Ahh, revenge! She begins to squeal and scream and carry on at 2am waking our neighbors up mid-snore. Daddy long-legs had found their way into the potty tent and my girl is terrified of spiders. My fiance, not so good with the patience thing in these situations, starts yelling at her because he tired of getting rained on. From the tent it sounds like they are killing each other. I give it a few minutes and when they continue to carry on; I get out and intervene for the sake of the entire campsite. And that ended our first night of camping….
