We are going camping this weekend for the first time in almost four years.

This is what happens when you buy a cabin. The cabin is all the good things about camping (catching frogs! morning campfire! drinking beer outside all afternoon!) and none of the bad things about camping (dealing with coolers for days! never feeling clean! having to go outside to pee!). But the kids miss camping and have been begging to go camping again so we are going with friends this weekend.

I am not excited.

I grew up camping, and will probably write an exhaustive post about that someday. We used to take the kids camping at least once every summer, even when they were babies. I do not recommend this. For me at least the combination stress of dealing with toddlers around the fire all day combined with the frustration of trying to get my baby and two-year-old to sleep in the tent while the sun was still up was not worth it. If could go back and do it again I would wait until they were older.

In the summer of 2020 the pandemic was in full swing. My kids were five and seven years old. I spent this entire summer fretting about whether or not schools were going to open in the fall (spoiler alert: ours didn’t). This was also the summer that none of the public pools opened in our area, most summer camps and programs were closed, and for a while we weren’t even supposed to use the public playgrounds.

I think we hit every nature center and every hiking trail within an hour radius of the city that year. There was literally nothing else we could do.

I decided we should go camping a couple times that summer, but when I went to book campsites I realized that everyone else in the area had the same idea. Every weekend, every site was booked. I was irrationally annoyed. Who were all these new campers who thought they could take up space in a campground on the weekend? I had been camping my entire life, and every year since becoming a parent! I had a right to those spots!

I did not have a right to those spots, but that didn’t stop me from grumbling about it.

When I looked more closely, I realized there were a good number of spots available mid-week, particularly Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But… my husband wouldn’t be able to come on those days. I looked at my kids who were currently in the backyard having a swordfight with sticks. One of them was in his underwear and the other was wearing a banana costume. Could I handle these two kids camping by myself?

I decided it was worth a shot as long as the banana costume stayed home. I booked some mid-week trips.

That’s how we ended up spending one night each that summer in William O’Brien State Park, Moose Lake State Park, and Jay Cooke State Park.

It turns out that a one-night camping trip is just about right from the packing perspective. I brought a change of clothes for everyone, but mostly we just stayed dirty for the full 24 hours. I only had to plan one dinner, and I went back to the basics on that: hot dogs roasted on sticks accompanied by a can of beans warmed directly on the fire. Pop-tarts for breakfast.

This was back when my youngest was in his Yoshi phase, so a rainbow of Yoshis often accompanied us on these trips. The Yoshis would perch on the picnic table and judge me while I drank cold instant coffee in the morning. I let the kids do all sorts of weird stuff with the fire and the food. We almost ended up sleeping in the car one night due to thunderstorms. We hiked to an old cemetery at one park and there was an eeriness to the air that made me uneasy. I ushered the kids out of there as fast I could trying to hide the fact that I was a little freaked out.

And it was in one of these state parks that I realized my youngest had somehow learned to read when he started reading out loud from a wayfinding sign on one of our hikes.

“Hey! Are you able to read that?” I asked him, surprised.

“No, I can’t read,” he insisted. “I just know what it says.”

In the past we had almost always gone camping with another family; this was very fun, and we made a lot of good memories that way. I did miss having my husband on these trips. but in some ways it felt much easier to be the only adult. It felt like the kids’ camping trip and I was just along for the ride. We did what they wanted to do, ate when they wanted to eat, stopped to check out all the rotten stumps that they wanted to investigate on the hike. There was no schedule, no pressure.

It was actually kind of great.

Those were the last times we went camping because we bought our cabin in May of the next year. I know the kids miss camping because they have told me so many times since then. I suppose it’s a good thing we’re going again this weekend, even if it means I need to inventory the cabin supply bins and figure out meals and find all the sleeping bags. In fact, now that I’ve gone on this walk through my memories, I am feeling much more positive about the coming weekend, and might even let the kids bring the banana costume this time.