The Birds and the Crickets

This past Saturday, Ian and I went camping in our backyard. This translates to simply sleeping in a tent, but Ian didn’t know the difference.

Kelly thought of the idea in the spring. I asked to borrow my mother’s tent, and it’d been sitting in our basement – expectantly – for a couple months now. I’d been waiting for the weather to warm; with recent heat indices in the 100s, I figured that it can’t get much warmer.

I raised the tent in what I thought would be the most comfortable spot in our backyard; I soon resigned myself to thinking, ‘Well, at least we’re close to the backdoor, if this thing backfires.’ There’s a reason our backyard isn’t used as a campground.

I don’t know what reaction I was expecting when I brought Ian to see the tent. I didn’t think he quite understood the concept of sleeping outside, in a tent, or if he really knew what a tent was. He pointed and said, ‘Tent.’ Okay, then.

We laid a blanket on the floor, and his sleeping bag on top of that. ‘See, we’re going to sleep here tonight. Sound like fun?’ I asked. Ian lay on the sleeping bag, hands behind his head – the standard sleeping position.

It was then I realized that Ian’s bedtime is eight o’clock. Mine isn’t much later, but it is later, and of course the sun doesn’t set until later than that. This should be interesting.

Hours later, after Ian’s bath, I collected our supplies: water bottle, lantern, books, pillow, booklight, sheet, alarm clock (mobile phone), fuzzy cow, and anti-bumpy-ground hammer. We kissed Mommy goodnight, and went to our tent.

Surprisingly, Ian went right to his sleeping bag and lay down. Also unsurprisingly, he then found the hammer. ‘Mammer! Mammer!’

Admittedly, I made the temptation worse by banging lumps into the ground – whacking things with a hammer will always be fun – but eventually I managed to distract him with Thomas and the Big, Big Bridge.

We followed Thomas with Where the Wild Things Are, and The Very Lonely Firefly. With each page, Ian’s eyelids dropped lower and lower, and his hand crept to his hair, twirling.

We said our bedtime prayers, kissed each other goodnight – and I turned away to read my book. Whoops.

‘Book! Daddy? Book!’ I closed my book; he started to cry.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘No nigh-nigh. No. No.’

‘Are you tired?’ A nod. ‘Do you want to sleep?’ A shaken head. ‘Do you want to sleep on Daddy’s pillow? You can use my pillow.’ He crawls over to me, and curls up on my pillow. I turned over, and started to drift to sleep.

Though you can’t call our yard a campground, my landscaping skills are such that we’re well on our way to becoming a forest preserve. We have lots of bugs. The crickets started chirping, and I heard Ian stir.

‘Bird! Bird?’

‘No, honey. Those are crickets. They’re bugs.’

‘Bug!’

‘Right. Bug.’ I lay on my back, and closed my eyes.

A few minutes later, I felt a hand crawl from my shoulders, to my neck, to my hair. Twirl.

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