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Camp-in seemed like a good idea
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___The motto of my life should be "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
___ This thought occurred to me yet again on the recent weekend when I took nine second grade Cub Scouts for an overnight "camp-in" at the Science Place in Dallas.
___ That’s right. Fifteen hours inside a
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MARK WINGFIELD
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museum with hordes of boys from all over North Texas. Plenty of adults were on hand as chaperones, to be sure. And it was a good thing.
___ There was no need for a special exhibit on energy in the science museum that night. We had a living demonstration in the boys who had invaded the place.
___ Actually, our boys behaved well--at least as well as second graders could be expected to behave under the circumstances. It helped that I was carrying a cell phone and had threatened to call the parents of any child who misbehaved--even if the call awoke the parents in the middle of the night, which, I reminded the boys, would not make for happy parents.
___ Some of the other boys around us from other Cub Scout dens apparently didn’t get the same lecture, though. One group in particular kept us all up past midnight with their cavorting after lights out. Best I could tell, the source of all the trouble was one boy--named Christian. Funny how kids’ names often fail to describe their character, huh?
___ In case you’ve ever wondered, museums really do fall silent at night; they shut off all the bells and whistles, moving parts and flashing lights. Even the robotic dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park exhibit come to a halt.
___ Nevertheless, sleep was the hardest part of this adventure. Even an air mattress couldn’t hide the hardness of that concrete floor. And it sure didn’t take long to spend the night there; we went to bed late and were awakened early.
___ And all the while, I had visions of my soft, cozy bed at home--and of the silence and happiness Alison was experiencing being home alone.
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___Ah, the sheer bliss of a night sans kids.
___ Actually, it was a bit strange. This was the first time in the seven years since the boys were born that I had been by myself at home. A few odd noises caught my ear, and I was a little nervous.
___ But better
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ALISON WINGFIELD
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the odd noise than a museum full of the sound of Cub Scouts. When Mark initially mentioned this outing, the first words out of my mouth were: "Not me. You can get somebody else to help you on this one."
___ It’s not that I don’t love our den. We have a good group of boys who are great fun. But after an hour-long den meeting, I’ve had all the fun I can have, and I’m ready for them to go home and my house to be restored back to semi-normal conditions. Anything longer than an hour and I start to go nutty. So an overnight was not in the cards for me.
___ Instead, I got to enjoy a ladies’ night out, complete with dinner and a movie.
___ What is it about being out with your own gender which makes things seem festive? Maybe it’s just the novelty of being out without husbands and kids, but we had a great time and cackled and giggled like teenagers, all the while talking about our missing kids and husbands.
___ And a movie on the big screen also is a novelty, since we rarely get around to seeing anything other than movies with animals as the main characters. All in all, a delightful evening.
___ And at the end of it, I got to come home to a soft bed and almost too quiet house.
___ I wouldn’t want it to be this way all the time, but it sure was nice for one night. Ecclesiastes is right when it says to everything there is a season.
Mark Wingfield is managing editor of the Standard. Alison Wingfield is a freelance writer. The Wingfields moved to Texas from Louisville, Ky., where Mark had been editor of the Western Recorder, in which this column appeared weekly.
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