The last week of summer, I took the boys and went down to Lion Country Safari to go camping. We were only gone three days, but I thought it would be a great final trip before school.<\/p>\n
The first evening of the trip, as we were staggering exhausted back to our tent, it occurred to me that we were all pretty grimy.<\/p>\n
“You know,” I said to the boys, “we really should get some showers.”<\/p>\n
“Aww…”<\/p>\n
I covered a yawn. “It’s that or stay grungy.”\u00a0 The sun had set and the rain had\u00a0stopped, but the air was hot and humid. We were walking in a cloud of sweat and bug spray, and both boys had streaks of mud on their faces. I chuckled. “Camp grungy.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” my youngest shouted. “Let’s stay camp grungy!”<\/p>\n
I suppose I should have pulled the Dad-card and made us shower. Instead, I tried to change their minds. “Camp grungy is really grungy,” I said. “Bug spray, sweat, mud… not to mention never brushing our teeth. We’re going to be so smelly, people will cross the street just to get away from us.”<\/p>\n
My youngest laughed. “Yeah!”<\/p>\n
His older brother smiled and looked at me appraisingly. I’m not sure, but I think he saw I was in trouble and was watching to see what I did.<\/p>\n
“We won’t be able to get in our sleeping bags,” I said. “We’ll be too dirty.”<\/p>\n
“It’s too hot for that, anyway,” the little guy said.<\/p>\n
“No pajamas, either. They’d get dirty.”<\/p>\n
“That’s okay, we can sleep in our clothes.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” my oldest chimed in. “That way we’ll have less laundry to do when we get back.”<\/p>\n
My youngest giggled. “Just one set of clothes each!”<\/p>\n
And so the argument was lost. Camp grunge wasn’t as bad as you might think, though I did insist on changing socks each morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the spectrum of dirtiness, few things approach the level of camp grunge, especially in South Florida in August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,120,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-l2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}