I spent my childhood going on camping trips. In my memory, we went several times every summer. The cool nights, the many rainy afternoons spent in our tents reading books or playing cards, and peering out the window of the camper to see a skunk making its way across the campsite loom large in recollection.

As an adult, every camping trip I’ve taken until now has been with my parents. They’ve provided an extra tent for our growing family, blankets when someone forgot a sleeping bag, and logistical support with meals. I’ve never had to fully plan and execute a trip by myself.

Then, friends of our invited us to go camping with them this summer. We’re now quickly approaching the weekend in question, and at 40, I’m making my first solo camping trip with my family, but without my parents.

I know from many trips with them what equipment I’ll need. I now recognize when I ate chocolate chip cookies with abandon or dug into some other prepared dish on a camping trip how much work Mom did ahead of time to feed us while we were “roughing it.”

I bought a grill, and additional fuel, because I’m my dad’s girl. I bought a third tent. We got two enormous jugs of spring water, and an empty for transporting water to wash dishes. We counted sleeping bags, flashlights, and tarps (we’re short one).

When I was a kid, we were the camping family that was prepared – for flash floods, for wind storms, for rainy weekends. Our sleeping bags didn’t get swamped. Our kitchen area was dry. Our tents stayed where they were planted.

It’s a tremendous standard to lay on myself, yet I find myself doing it anyway.

It’s true, we made one other camping trip on our own, ten years ago on our 5th wedding anniversary. The Chaplain and I (and our fourth kid, who was due in a couple of months) went on a weekend camping trip. My main memory of that trip was how long it took us to make a fire robust enough to cook dinner on that first night. I don’t remember what we ate, but I do remember we were ravenous by the time it finished cooking, and I was so relieved we’d finally produced something edible.

My plan for our upcoming trip is to make a lot of the food in advance. I’m not an experienced camp cook, and I don’t trust myself to become one in the course of a weekend.

In some ways, camping is the logical course for a big family like ours to be able to get out of the house and do something together affordably, but with a spouse who works in the ministry (read: weekends) along with having a 9-5 job during the week, we don’t have a lot of opportunities to “get away” other than our yearly Tobago trips, pandemic-permitting (or not, as it’s been lately). We save both money and vacation days for those trips all year. It doesn’t leave a lot of time (or mental bandwidth) for camping.

So here I am, applying my perfectionism to something I’d like to do more, but rarely do at all. It’s sure to bite me at least once during the weekend. Here’s to letting go of the things we can’t control, as well as some of the things we think we can control, but really can’t if we’re busy controlling all the other things we can control (are you still with me?).

When it comes down to it, you can’t mess up s’mores, and I have all the ingredients for those.

And this time, we’re bringing fire bricks.

Please wish us the best.