Our great backyard campout

We camped out in our backyard last night, mostly because Rebekah wanted to.

The National Wildlife Federation hosts a Great American Backyard Campout every June, I think their goal is to encourage families to spend more time unplugged and outdoors, and every summer for the last couple of years we have been telling the girls we would do it. We try to take an actual camping trip each summer, but we have been out of town each time this NWF campout has come up, including this year. We won't have the chance this summer to go camping, so we figured we better jump at the opportunity of a Friday night where we had nothing else planned, to at least set up a tent in the backyard.

Rebekah did most of the help in getting the tent up, and she looked so cute laying down in the big, empty tent.



I read a statistic on the NWF website that said on average, kids get about 8 minutes of unstructured outdoor playtime each day. That's sad! I remember playing outside all day long when I was kid. And while it's not quite the same for our girls, I know they spend a lot more than 8 minutes a day outside.



After we ate dinner outside, Emma went over to a friend's house for a couple of hours to play games and roast marshmallows, while the rest of us did the same at home.



Alyssa and Rebekah kicked a ball around and played baseball for a while, it was fun to watch them play together.



When Emma got home the other girls were so excited to show her this toad. Emma was the only one who would touch it to attempt the capture, but I made them leave it where it was.


And because the evening wouldn't be complete without a story: I woke up about 3:30 am to hear Dave leaving the tent. I asked him where he was going, and he said he was going to the bathroom. I had a suspicion that he was not coming back to the tent because his pillow was tucked under his arm. Emma had crawled up onto the cot he was sleeping on, and she is the biggest bed hog ever {on a normal sized bed!} so I can't imagine he was getting any sleep with her next to him.

I had dozed off after he left, but remember waking up and noticing that he hadn't made it back. Just as I was drifting off to sleep again, I saw a light that seemed to span the length of the tent a couple of times, then go away. I was scared, but it was really brief, and I convinced myself I had imagined it in my half awake state. I had trouble falling back to sleep, and over the course of what I guess to be the next half hour it happened again, then one more time. I was beyond scared at this point, again being in and out of sleep making it feel even scarier than the situation warranted. I climbed up on Emma's cot and stood up, trying to see out of a skylight in the tent. I could not see anything or anyone and thought maybe the light was Dave. I considered calling out to him, but then the thought entered my mind that there's no better way to make the message clear to a would-be attacker that we were in there and vulnerable than to shout a man's name out into the darkness. I wasn't sure what to do, but knew I could not leave the girls in the tent, not even for a moment just to walk to the house. Our yard is not huge, but big-ish, and we were a good distance away from the house. I stayed next to Emma on the cot clutching a leather case that held a hunting knife. Finally as it started getting light, and I was sure not only that the danger had passed, but also that I was losing my sanity, I allowed myself to fall asleep.

Back in the house a couple hours later, Dave informed me that he had a sleepless night of checking on us after he couldn't tolerate the cot with Emma anymore. He didn't want to disturb us, so kept a safe distance away from the tent as he shined a light in to make sure we were all good. So, I was in the tent fearful for our lives, not sleeping, with Emma's body flung haphazardly across my legs and Dave was in the house, also not sleeping, carefully keeping watch over the tent...a great backyard campout for sure! Alyssa told me how soundly she slept in the tent, adding that she loved sleeping outside :-)

Before last night, I never understood why Dave has brought the hunting knife into our tent on every camping trip we've ever gone on {in my mind, children + sharp object = danger}. Unless we are camping, it's one of those items that I forget we even own, I have never used it for anything before. But if you're a crazy campsite stalker, I'll learn real fast if you attempt to get into our tent!