Urban Adventure

A few weeks back, Ivy started talking about “champing”, and neither Joey nor I were sure what she meant. She was quite excited and got frustrated when we made it clear we didn’t understand. Finally she threw her hands in the air and gave us her best 4-going-on-14 eyeroll: “It’s when you take the marshmallows and put the fire on them!”

Whoa, wait… she meant s’mores, but what was champing? Then it dawned on me: CAMPING.

“That’s what I tole you – CHAMPING!”

So, we had a communication breathrough. That escalated the requests to go champing I tried to appease her by building a tent in her room with bedsheets and chairs, or a pillow fort in the living room. Fun, but not enough. She really wanted to do the cookout thing and understood that champing happens outside, at night.

So, last night while Joey was out of town at Jim’s wedding, once night fell, Ivy and I champed in the back yard.

It was the maiden voyage for a 2-man hexagonal dome tent I bought a year before (that thing is never going back in the bag, obviously), which fit just right on the lower patio. Ivy helped me with assembling the tent poles and raising the dome. She was excited!

Ivy selected several sticks that had fallen off the dead cypress tree in the front yard to use as skewers for the hotdogs and marshmallows, and we enjoyed s’mores (mmmm, burnt crispy marshmallows) and hotdogs with a juice box and soda for dinner, under the cloud-covered stars.

Then we retired to the tent. With two pillows, a Hello Kitty blanket and a Tinkerbell sleeping back laid out on the floor, we reclined on the ground and looked up to the skies through the open mesh of the tent. We went through the animals and shapes we saw in the cloud formations, and watched the moon slip out for view every now and then. A few airplanes zoomed by far overhead. There was a little car traffic, but not much. No trains passed by. Mostly we heard crickets. Lots and lots of crickets. Made it hard to believe downtown and its skyscrapers were less than a mile away!

Ivy said “this is going to be a beautiful night!” and then asked for my phone so she could watch Diego on Netflix. Hah! We may were champing, but this was definitely an urban adventure 🙂 After awhile she got tired of the cartoons, and shut it off. A little sleepy and a little sweaty she rolled over and kissed me and said “I love you” and went to sleep. D’awwwww.

I tried to sleep. For about 90 minutes. I wish I could have, because it was nice, but these hips and back on a brick patio surface with no padding wasn’t gonna cut it. Around 10:30 I scooped the essentials and got Ivy to sit up, and we finished our slumber indoors.

She was a little disappointed to wake up indoors, but we went over our fun from the night before and all was well.

So, Ivy’s been camping. We have no idea where she picked up on this, but I’m glad she did. That’s something I’m looking forward to doing more. Next time, with an air mattress, though… and perhaps more than a mile away from the 4th largest city in the US 🙂