Camping is a strange thing – you pay a lot of money to basically live in the wilderness with all the attendant dangers and risks.
This summer, we’ve had a few…
Pace hit himself in the face with a metal scooter while attempting a trick, cutting his face, giving himself a fat lip and loosening one tooth.
Pace fell on a hillside path and scratched his chest with a branch pretty good
Pace (see a theme here?) injured his wrist briefly after a wipe out at the Fort Qu’Appelle skate park. I initially feared a break but luckily it was just tender for awhile.
Sasha fell while running on the road in front of the campsite and scrapped her knee pretty good.
Sasha’s had a few “sand in the eyes” moments on the playground. My hope is that it’s not from kids throwing sand intentionally at her but just being careless as they dig wildly.
Both kids have been hit by a swing when not paying attention.
One cousin who was visiting had an accident on his bike and hurt his groin pretty bad.
I have had innumerable splinters because I keep forgetting to put on work gloves when I haul/chop wood (or even lifting logs from our wood pile to the fire can give a splinter if you’re not being careful/have a couple beers in you!)
I’ve also had a couple headaches in the morning through the summer but I’m not sure what caused those! 😉
At different times, Shea and I have both suffered through at least one weekend with a cold/sore throat/runny nose which is not fun at the best of times and especially when you’re camping.
I’m usually most susceptible but none of us have had any bad sunburns all summer though I did burn my nose one weekend.
(One fun highlight of our most recent weekend was watching him create various playlists on our streaming music service – one for rap songs, one for rock songs, one for pop songs.)
We’ve tried a few s’mores variations ourselves with a current favourite being “Exploding s’moreos” where we not only use an Oreo instead of a graham cracker but also the limited edition Fireworks Oreos that have pop rocks candy mixed in!
You end up feeling obligated (or at least we do) to go out to your camp site as much as you can so you end up missing other fun things – we’ve turned down free tickets to Regina Folk Fest, an invite to go to Mustard Fest and it’s extremely unlikely we’ll get to even one Riders’ game in person this summer like we usually do.
On a related note, because we try to get to the lake every weekend, a lot of stuff we normally do on weekends – laundry, grocery shopping, cutting grass, housecleaning, etc. – either gets neglected or squished into our already busy weekday evening routines.
It’s probably not a huge deal but because we end up hauling out a lot more for a seasonal site than we would for shorter overnight trips, we’re likely going to spend more time hauling all the stuff back – either piecemeal over a series of weekends or all at once with a cargo trailer or something. (Then we’re going to have to find *more* space to store all the stuff we accumulated too.)
The more you’re at your camp site, the more chance that a spontaneous water balloon fight will break out and, unlike when we were growing up, adults (and even some kids) now carry electronic devices with them at all times. So there’s a risk of your device getting soaked (hasn’t happened yet but Grandpa took a water balloon in the chest from someone – not Sasha though she’s smiling mischievously in this picture – that could’ve been bad if he had his phone on him!)
