Roughing it

We're going camping with the Cub Scouts this weekend, and much as I want to, I'm not looking forward to it.

I want to be excited, I really do. I want my son to think it's cool that we're putting up a tent and sleeping on the ground. In the cold. In the wild. Smelling like campfire. Worrying about bears, and whether they can sniff out the glucose tabs I've stashed in the tent, even though you're not supposed to keep any food in the tent with you.

But maybe I'm just being a big baby about it. (Fine, stop your snorting, I am being a baby.) I even went so far as to blame my dread on diabetes -- it will be so hard to manage Mark's diabetes out in the wild. But the truth is, it's not the diabetes, it's the camping with a kid I'm dreading.

See, in my not-so-distant past, I camped my fair share. But it was me and my friends, with a case of beer, a pack of hot dogs, $20, an old car and no real itinerary. We hiked where we wanted, cooked over a fire and got up when we felt like it. No one whined or complained of being bored and asked continually to play Gameboy; no one sat dangerously close to the campfire, and singed marshmallows and arm hairs; no one refused to eat breakfast because they hated scrambled eggs. Basically, I was in charge of myself. I was not (in most instances) a danger to my friends, nor were they a danger to me.

Which is not how I envision camping with my son. Instead, I envision a whole lotta temper tantrums. I envision Mark being mad for any and all of the following reasons:

• Not liking the meals.
• Wanting more marshmallows.
• Not wanting to touch any worms while fishing.
• Not catching a fish.
• Catching a fish but not wanting to touch the caught fish.
• Not wanting to clean the fish (but wanting to wave around the knife, because hey, he's got his knife chip!)
• Not wanting to touch the fish to throw it back in the lake.
• Not wanting to test his blood sugar in the middle of the night after eating five s'mores.
• Having high blood sugar after eating five s'mores.
• Having low blood sugar after eating five s'mores because he took so dang much insulin to cover them.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid. My parents took us camping every summer, and they had four kids, not just one.

But maybe that's really why I'm worried. I remember those family camping trips by the catastrophes that marked them.

I remember my brother Tim playing with a dead fish in a lake, attacking us as he hummed the Jaws theme. I remember a squirrel popping out of a potato chip bag and scaring me half to death, igniting a life-long hatred of squirrels. I remember watching a Marine strike force flooding the skies, seas and beach, searching for nuclear waste when an empty paint can washed ashore San Onofre beach. I remember my family driving off and trying to leave me in the middle of nowhere (twice!), while my brothers waved silently out the back window. And I remember Smed's many trips to the hospital, for falling off the high dive, getting stung by a bee, and getting hit in the face with a rock (he shouldn't have been calling me names!).

Now that I think about it, I've got good reason to be nervous about camping. And even more reason to be nervous about camping with Smed!

Calm down, you're saying, it's just overnight. And you're right. I'll take a deep breath, and pack appropriately. Sleeping bags, tent, granola bars, sense of humor. And most importantly, a map and our medical insurance cards, in case we have to make an unscheduled visit to the ER in the middle of the night (hopefully, not because the bears found the glucose tabs!).