Happy Camper
It isn’t easy being a parent of the greatest child in the world but I’m coping. There’s all those smiles to return and all those laughs to take in. It can be exhausting. See? Even he needs to take a break now and then.
To be honest, he deserves the break much more than I. The little guy celebrated his recovery from a recent bout of pneumonia by acquiring a nasty stomach virus. He spent more than a week fighting it, a fight that required a few trips to the doctor’s office and a second round of nebulizer treatments. The little guy has been a sport but, until recently I didn’t realize how much it took out of him.
Why is that? Well, this weekend the little child I remember emerged. That child burdened by sickness and daily doses of medicine was left behind. A smiling kid replaced it. He smiled more on Saturday than he has in two weeks. A beacon of cheerfulness wiped away the exhausted eyes that illness had brought. To say that makes me happy is an understatement. It warms my heart to see him laugh and play. I’m thrilled to see evidence that he’s truly feeling better.
And it’s a good thing too, as the wife and I spent the weekend visiting her family in Pennsylvania. It was an impromptu visit – we waited until Saturday morning to decide that it was just nice enough to test out the newly purchased camper – but an enjoyable one, at least from a visitation standpoint.
We took in some delicious food at the sister-in-law’s restaurant. We camped in the front yard of the brother-in-law. I got to visit my dad and he got to spend some time with the well version of little Cambell.
From a weather standpoint, let’s just say that the weatherman and I will have words. The temperature wasn’t all that bad — it was scheduled to get into the lower 40’s. However, I must have missed the fine print. The winds kicked up on Saturday night and were unrelenting.
Little did I know how susceptible a popup camper is to wind. The canvas of the camper battled with nature, constantly shifting to and fro. It made just enough noise to keep the wife awake most of the night but, thankfully, not enough to do the same to our sleeping child. I’m claiming ownership of the sleeping gene. I’m frankly amazed that the kid slept through what seemed to be an inside view of a tornado.
By morning, evidence of the overnight rains were hard to find. The canvas of the camper was dry to the touch, literally blown dry the morning gales. Closing the camper wasn’t a picnic as angry winds fought my every move. The experience itself was much akin to squeezing a balloon into a matchbox; you could never get both sides in at all, much less at once.
But all the extra effort and all the weather didn’t do much to dampen my spirits. I had a happy kid in the back seat, a sleepy wife next to me, and a brand new RV behind me as I headed down the road. If all weekends could end that way, I’d be a happy camper.
