They went camping IN the house. Why? Don’t ask me; in theory it made sense to them. Both the office and the living room were setup as “camp” complete with tents, urinals, and kerosene campstoves. The kitchen was wall-to-wall coolers, and both bathrooms sported water balloons, both burst and ready-to-fire. All the furniture had been redecorated to look like the great outdoors, and the “No Littering”, “You are Here” maps and Smokey the Bear “Put out your fire” signs were worse than actual litter would have been.

Aigan sneezed three times in a row, just like DaDa. “Would you PLEASE stop using my shirt as your kleenex!” hollered his oldest brother, Eoin (Ian). “Yeeeshhht,” replied Aigan with his toddler voice, shaking his head “No” at the same time. Meanwhile, Bryan ran around with tinfoil antennae on his head. Six-year-old Breandan was screaming, “You can read minds?!! Cool, dude. Will you make me one too so I can put up the tent by myself without having to ask DaDa how?” Eoin’s teenage response was a typical, “That might make sense on your home planet of Pluto, but here on earth, it’s CUCKOO!!” with the “You’re crazy” circling of finger by forehead.

“Au contraire,” responded DaDa, sporting his own antennae made out of a broken radio antennae and a metal barbecue flipper duct-taped together. “Your brothers make perfect sense on this earth. You just need your own antennae!” Eoin muttered, “Take me, God. Just take me,” even as he fashioned his own out of ball point pen innards and some blunt children’s scissors. He pretended (or did he really succeed?) to read Aigan’s toddler mind, then cracked up. “I only have a few brain cells left….Have mercy on me. You think some straaaaange things, little bro.”

Bryan, who was nine, had decided to revisit his own toddler days. Some or all of them had decorated a previously pristine toilet in several shades of blue permanent marker, and Bryan was industriously feeding it Aigan’s “little people.” As a toddler, Bryan would feed the toilet various items because he thought it was hungry. Presumably at the moment he was pretending it was a lake, because he said, “The lake never gives up her dead. MUAWWWWWW!” as he flushed and flooded it. Aigan copied his brother by feeding various toy blocks to it, then tried to help mop up the mess all over the floor with toilet paper. “Clean up lake!” all four boys were chanting as DaDa ran to the scene. “You’re killing me, babe….JUST killing me,” stated DaDa, rolling his eyes and trying not to laugh. “If you want to dam up the lake, you’ve gotta use something more substantial,” and tossed them some knotted up towels he touted as sandbags.

After many more such comic campout antics, everyone was in tents for the night telling ghost and campfire stories and singing all sorts of goofy songs. “And now the radio has gone dead. PERFECT!” pouted Eoin. “I was using it with earbuds to drown out your meager storytelling and mangling of music singing!”

…now in a MUCH more humorous frame of mind, I giggled and started cleaning up the mess. I figured all of our tales of the campout would make great bedtime stories for days to come, and we’ve framed the antennae.

(: