Chubby Bunny…

Ah, the innocence of youth. The carefree uncontrollable laughter that sometime I forget about in the midst of responsibility….

I still laugh a lot, life is good, but I rarely laugh so hard that it become uncontrollable. If fact I think the last time I have laughed this hard was over Christmas while listening to my Aunt Kathy and Uncle Denny talk about the “hunting lodge” suite they got at the local motel with the stuffed duck motifs hanging over the 1950’s vibrating bed with the worn electrical wires…but that a story for another time…. Tonight was one of those nights where we laughed until we cried...

Friday night I chaperoned a young women’s campout out on a farm about thirty miles from my sprawling suburbia. It was good timing for me since I am so homesick for the rolling hills and open fields of Iowa. We took about 15 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 just for a quick overnight camp to get them ready for Girls Camp this summer. My car arrived an hour late after fighting the Friday night rush-hour and then missing the road. (I had two teenage girls promising me they knew exactly where we were going….ten miles past the turn I decided I would have better luck finding the place driving with my eyes closed than listening to them). We got there and made some tinfoil dinners and set up camp.

And then the infamous marshmallows made their appearance with the introduction of the first round of “chubby bunny.” If you are not familiar with this game (a.k.a you had no life as a child) everyone keeps shoving marshmallow into their mouth until they can no longer pronounce the phrase “chubby bunny.” I was proud of myself for my six marshmallows, but opted out of the second round because my allergies would not allow me to breath through my nose, which poses a significant health problem. Before we started the head camp director, Sueann took a stern motherly position and said – “don’t place too many in your mouth, you could breath in the marshmallow dust and asphyxiate yourself”. And then she turned around and won with a total of eleven marshmallows – she must be built like a chipmunk.

When I left for the campout it was almost 90 degrees and humid. I think it was the hottest day yet this spring. Friday we also had out apartment exterminated and so our entire kitchen was piled in our bedroom in front of the camping equipment closet. Texas weather does not vary much so instead of digging out my sub-zero thermal sleeping bag (which I have yet to use since I moved here) and I grabbed an old comforter to sleep on and a light fleece blanket.

We retired to our tents about midnight (after twist-tying the zippers together on another tent) and everything was soaked with dense dew and the wind had picked up to over twenty miles per hour (which is odd for this area). And then the cold front moved in, the only day I should have watched the weather report. The temperature dropped to fifty degrees and I spent the night shivering in my pathetic sleeping setup. I can honestly say this is one of the few times I have been cold down here. Cold is almost an unknown feeling now, when it hits the body can’t adjust. I woke up thinking that I just had the most miserable night in years.

So we left Saturday morning after a homemade breakfast and some horseback riding and headed back to suburbia to fight the smog and the traffic.