We just returned 4 days ago from our annual trip to the KOA.
Having missed last year due to Covid, this familiar trip felt like a welcome back to pre-pandemic life. Just sun, and swimming, and togetherness!
It was going to be great!
Years worth of memories greeted us as we pulled up the drive to check in.
We unpacked the truck and set up in the same old way: Us, with a cabin right next to my friend Amanda and her three small kids.
That’s the way that we do it.
Just women and kids.
(I realized long ago that my OCD husband was not at all made for this.)
He used to come years ago, until I started seeing all the signs that maybe it would be better for him to stay home and watch the pets and some baseball in his underwear rather than taking in the great (also very dirty) outdoors with us.
He just loves his hand-vac a little too much to be OK with the dirt and mess of it.
Ashy marshmallow faces still black from the night before?
Someone bring him a shock blanket, and wrap it around tight!
The last year that he came he spent nearly an entire afternoon grumbling, trying to sweep out the tent, because “What do we NOT understand about wiping off our feet on the special foot towel he had brought and laid out?”
We were barbarians, and he was the only one that lived like he should.
That Danny Tanner doesn’t understand that camping is about letting yourself be free.
Free to leave out some stuff, and free to track some stuff in.
I crave that freedom the whole year long.
As much work as it is, I think I actually NEED camping. The crackle of a fire, the open sky…
I need it deep in my soul.
We arrived at camp a week ago, and it did not take long for me to realize that this year would be unlike any other year, as, for the first time,
I had brought now teenage girls along.
This year my two middle girls had also brought a friend.
“More people for games and helping watch the little kids,” I thought.
Boy, was I wrong.
Friends, let me tell you about what happens when you bring three beautiful teenage girls to a campground where the open breeze carries their scent off into the woods:
Teenage boys will literally come from out of the trees, that’s what.
They will creep out like Chupacabra, coming out to see on whom they’ll feast.
They can sense them.
They can feel the slight earth tremble from the Tik Toks beats.
Teen girls will still bring perfume and lipgloss along, and you’ll wonder why they’re applying mascara instead of helping you chop or scrub.
You will end up looking like you have lived in those woods and eaten squirrels all your life, while they walk around camp red-carpet ready; Like they’re newly verified.
That first night my friend Amanda and I just sat watching it from a distance, and shaking our heads, as another one, and another one, and another one came until we were surrounded by boys probably very fresh off of their voice changes, and admiring their peach fuzz mustaches in the camp bathroom mirror.
That night those boys perched on a stump across from our camp in the dark,
just staring at the girls for hours, unaware that my phone has night-vision mode and I was photographing them.
Everywhere the girls walked, a crew of them followed behind.
They even showed up with walkie-talkies the second day, as to better be able to report to each other where the girls were going, and what next moves they would make.
We overheard them saying things like “They’re on the move,” and
“Now onto the second phase.”
By the second night there was girl drama with two other teen girls, who
(based on jealousy, I would assume)
kept walking past our cabin swearing at and even mooning the girls.
At that point Amanda got involved.
She’s little, but she’s mighty.
The kind you’re real glad is yours.
She spoke with the girls asking just who and where exactly their parents were.
She’s a kind-hearted social worker,
But she will also cut a fool.
On the third day our girls all came to report that they’d met a new boy,
making the ring-leader of the walkie-talkie crew jealous, and the other girls jealous, too.
As they spoke, I pictured a dual.
They told us this new twist talking a hundred miles an hour.
I now know everything about this boy,
including what spices his mom used on her chicken, based on the smell of their trailer.
I just kept side-eyeing Amanda wondering if next year, based on this year’s drama,
I’d be coming alone with this group home – completely without her.
Her kids are still little, and I’m sure she left this camping trip thanking God she still has time before she has teenagers squawking and doing mating dances around her.
It was a whole lot of drama to take in.
So many twists and turns.
The most epic one being when, on the last night, to go out with a bang,
the first boy that she had met, but never really spoken to, approached my 14 year old, Chloe, right in front of me and blurted out to her,
“Sorry for spam texting you, but, well….see…..It’s because I’m in love with you.”
He then turned on a heel and ran back into the woods;
The girls later reporting that they saw him in the center of his boy posse with them gently rubbing his back, and with, what appeared to be, tears in his eyes.
Every moment a new development that they’d come back, or text to report.
Who said what, and who was where…
The teen drama had come knocking and they were primed and ready to open the door.
I had thought the trip would be about s’mores, and swimming,
but apparently it was more Maury Povich show.
On the final night, after the little ones had all been put down,
Amanda and I sat around the fire in the dark with the teenage girls as they all went around giddily telling us dozens of details.
Like they’d been on a whole separate trip than we had.
I just smiled watching the glow of the fire on their faces as they told their tales, eyes dancing,
feeling happy that even though the drama had been a large amount,
at least I have kids that want to tell me all of their stories,
instead of just clamming up, and me having to pry them out.
It has taken all 4 days of us being back home to recover from that trip.
(and also to soak the burnt rice pot, but that’s a whole other thing)
Justin offered an extremely helpful shrug and then a, “Well you choose to do it,” when I flopped on the couch telling him how tired I was.
Who knows?
He may be onto something by staying home alone in underwear, so drama free.
I thought I was going on our traditional camping trip, and instead ended up starring in four episodes of
Dawson’s Creek.
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
