Camping In

The girls have recently discovered the joys of "camping out"...inside the house. They've always enjoyed building tents out of blankets and pillows, then their aunt Debbie bought them real pup tents a couple of years ago which led to a period of indoor camping. It's amazing how much space a couple of pup tents occupy when set up in the family room.

Well aunt Debbie struck again a few weeks back when the girls made the trip up to the Northwest with Grammy and Papa to visit her in her new condo. Since space and sleeping arrangements was an issue, she bought the girls these Disney Princess air mattress/sleeping bag combos. They're actually pretty cool. You inflate the air mattress then slip the sleeping bag over the top. The sleeping bag stays in place and you don't have to worry about sliding off of the air mattress. I've got to hand it to aunt Debbie: she is the giver of cool gifts.

The girls brought the mattresses home after their trip, and they weren't much of an issue until this week when Diane's brother and his family came to town. He has two boys roughly the girls' age and at some point someone came up the idea of doing sleepovers. One of the girls would spend the night at Grammy and Papa's house and one of the boys would come home with us, then the next night we'd switch. Great plan.

Out came the air mattress/sleeping bag combos, and they worked great. My youngest nephew, who's four, made a little macho fuss over sleeping in a "girls bed", but that didn't last long. Both sleepover nights were huge successes. But now we can't get the girls to sleep in their own beds! They've taken turns sleeping in each others' rooms and have been putting up a fuss about sleeping in their perfectly good beds. So we've decided to put the kibosh on this recent trend before it gets out of hand.

And believe me, I know from personal experience how out of hand it can get. When I was about 11, my brother and I saw the movie Alien. It was a Sunday night and we were at my Dad's place. He let us stay a little later before dropping us off at home so we could watch the Sunday night premiere of Alien on HBO. So we "watched" the movie (mostly through our fingertips), it scared the mother-junkies out of us, and my Dad took us home in time for us to get into bed because Monday, as it turned out, was a school day. I slept not a frickin' wink. My brother slept not a frickin' wink either. We spent the better part of three months taking turns sleeping in a sleeping bag, sans air mattress, on the hard floor of each others' room, well aware of the fact that monsters materialize UNDERNEATH the bed, making the unfortunate floor-dweller of that particular evening easy fodder. But I guess we figured that getting eaten together was better than getting eaten alone. And unlike the poor fools in Alien, we weren't in space where no one can hear you scream, so we persisted in our nightly ritual. And I wonder where the girls get some of their nervous, paranoid tendencies. Mystery solved.

So we packed the air mattresses away. It's only a matter of time until I do something stupid like let them watch a movie that they're too young to see and that scares the mother-junkies out of them. Then history will repeat itself. At least they'll have comfy air mattresses to sleep on.