Feeling Old

For McGrooter's birthday, he got to invite his cousin, Kale, over to spend the night last night. So he and I drove up to White County to pick up Kale and started the evening off by eating at McDs. I tried my hardest to convince McGrooter that we should eat somewhere else. But it was his birthday and I wasn't going to play my parental ace. So we ate at the golden arches and I enjoyed heartburn the rest of the night.

From there we went to the family fun center to ride go-carts and play games. We started off on the go-carts (or at least the boys did) and McG immediately becomes Dale, Jr. (or Jeff Gordon as he would prefer to be called...but I'm writing this, so I can use my favorite driver). He begin passing on the inside (with a few bumps of course). Kale is enjoying the drive, swerving around and smiling, having a great time. But McG is intent on passing everyone on the track, and then doing it again. One of the other kid's father came over to me and said, "Looks like you need to get him into go-cart racing." Yeah! Then I could live my dreams through him. And to think...I hated NASCAR until I married Leslie (not because of her, of course, but I started watching it with her father). We also enjoyed some video games and air hockey. Then we headed home.

We'd talked about camping out, but it was almost dark and I knew we wouldn't have enough light to setup camp. But after a phone call to the homebase we learned that mom had setup the tent. When we got home it was dark, but the tent was setup (and done quite well I might add) along with a fire ring ready to light. So we grabbed sleeping bags, marshmallows, beef jerky, and headed out. We gathered some more twigs and built our fire (without matches thanks to our handy flint and magnesium along with some dryer lint). The fire was nice and we enjoyed toasting the marshmallows, dropping only a few in the fire. But soon the boys were both asking, "When are we going into the tent." They were tired and it was getting close to 10. So we finished up, put our fire out and went into the tent. We got in our bags and then they decided we needed to tell stories. But then they noticed I was opening my beef jerky and wanted to know what that was. After trying a small piece they decided they liked it and wanted more. So we ate beef jerky for a while. McG exclaimed, "Hey this is good for you, it's fat free!" The bag said 97% (in small letters) and then fat free (in large letters). He and Kale are both reading now so they both like to tell you what things say. We hung up our glow stick and turned the lantern off and made pillows out of sweatshirts, and then zipped our mummy bags up. There was a little bit of giggling and whispering, but pretty soon I could hear Kale breathing heavily and knew he'd passed out. McG wasn't far behind him. I fell asleep finally, but then woke up about 3, my back killing me. I was able to readjust but at 4 I had to get up. My back was wrenching. I thought, "Man, I don't remember feeling this way camping before." Then I remembered it'd been 20 years since I camped regularly in boy scouts. 20 years! That sounds like such a long time.

 But as tired as I am this morning and as much as my back feels like its been twisted like a pretzel, I am thankful for the memories. We made some good ones. Leslie commented this morning that she listened through the window while we were in the tent and that it "was so cute...it sounded like a commercial." But next time I'm going to put some more leaves under the tent, and find my foam pad to go under my bag. Oh yeah, and probably get the bottle of Advil out.