Oops I Did It Again

In order for DS to move onto the next step in his Scouting career, he needs to attend a Mother-and-Sons Camping weekend. It's actually a required activity, and while technically the mother bit of it is optional, YEAH RIGHT if I'm going to disappoint my son. No way. Remember my first rule of parenting? Thou Shalt Suffer. So I was going on this camp if I liked it or not. (And those who are long-time readers of this blog will know that no, I don't like it, and yes, I did this very same thing about 2 years ago.) (I'm an awesome Mum like that.)

A few weeks ago when he told me about it he also mentioned that this camp was different to the last one because it was "intense." As we all know, I don't DO camps, and certainly not intense ones, so I asked him for more information. "Are we going on a really long and muddy hike? Abseiling? Learning to live off of rations? What on earth can be intense about a 3 day mother and son camping event?" "No, Mum, I didn't say it would be intense. I said it would be IN TENTS."

Which pretty much makes it intense, doesn't it?

A couple of days ago we got the driving instructions for this camp which went something like this: go down the highway for an hour, blah blah, turn left at the dirt road, yadda yadda, drive 1.2 km down the dirt road to the postbox and turn left, etc etc....and drive very carefully through the dirt and potholes and sheer cliff faces until you see the large green toilet block, which is what we are camping next to. So if you find the toilet block, you've found your home for the next few days. That there are toilets at all, I'm grateful for. That I need to SLEEP right next to said toilets...well, yeah, this is going to be one intense weekend, isn't it? Intensely smelly, I'm guessing - and that's without the combined forces of 18 pre-teen boys out in the woods.

So as you sit in your warm home, reading this post by the glow of your lovely laptop, I'm probably shivering my ass off in a muddy field, wishing like hell they do not start from 100 for "100 bottles of beer on the wall" and surrounded by THOSE mothers we know I love and adore. Once I've endured all of that, I'm going to crawl (back groaning, hip protesting) into my very small tent (which apparently is a '2 man' tent, but I never met a man taller than 5'0" who fits in one of those, or is thin enough to get in there with somoene else as well) and try to fall asleep on the cold hard ground, only to be woken in the morning to do it all again, with probably only a cold, wet, muddy hike to look forward to.

Spare a prayer for me, okay?(and here's hoping some good blog fodder comes out of it.)