Campy

 When we lived here:

And looked like this:

 

 

We had this:

And used to do this:

And this:

With friends like these:

 

Then we went all corporate and suburban, put the tent in storage, and hunkered down into our 30's.  But this year, we said enough is enough.  It's time to go camping again.  

In September our church had a campout, so it was a perfect opportunity to update our gear - a family tent, a few more sleeping bags, an LED lantern.

 We still froze our butts off but it was a good first run.

A few weeks later we went car camping at a regional park about an hour away.  Ed scoffed it as not-real-camping but I asked him what he expects when he's a slave to The Man and can't take a day off work to go real camping.  We gotta take what we can get and really, the whole point (at least for me) is to give the kids memories.  And they don't care if we're in a regional park, not a national one.  We got pizza for dinner on the way down.

 It had a playground.

Poppy loved the headlamp...

 And sleeping in this, in this.

I loved staying cozy in my new sleeping bag and waking up to this canopy:

Ed loved making biscuits in the dutch oven, and hot chocolate on the camping stove:

And the kids, as we'd hoped, just loved it all: