Just because you have a tent doesn't mean you have to go spend the night in the woods somewhere.  You can have just as much fun right in your own back yard.  And this weekend, we did.  Little Miss has a birthday on Monday and was really itching to get a tent set up, so we decided to give her a present early.  It was her very own tent.  It happens to already be damaged, but we will look past that and get to the fun of it all.
      It so happens that the Maine camping season is not as long as we would like.  Unless you have a heater, you can't start spending the night outside until June.  We have definitely made plans to do just that, but for the mean time, we needed daytime fun.
     So after the set-up, which was really easy, we took turns playing bear and shaking the tent from every which angle every few seconds.  The girls inside would scream and laugh so hard and so loud that there really was no separating the two sounds.  And the person outside had fun just watching them squirm with fear.  We also had some giggles over the funny hair the girls all seemed to get when inside the tent.
     Baby Bee had different plans with our old Goodwill doggie tent.  She slept for quite some time, which is just fine because she tends to burn very easy, and under the tent she was perfectly safe from those nasty sun rays that plague her.  The tent was so fun that we decided to bring it to Auntie Cricket's house to share with the boys.  Lil' Riot and Spaz had a great time camping out in the day.  Even The Gamer got in on the fun for a few minutes.
    
     Of course no fun comes without a few rules.  There was absolutely no horsing around allowed inside the tent or any eating either.  That didn't seem to stop the kids from having fun, possibly because they paid little attention to the horsing around rule.  We'll definitely be adding more tents to our backyard this summer.   The new one was only about $23 at Walmart, so it will be something we can add to the girls' birthdays this year without too much strain on the wallet.
     We also set up a fire at Cricket's and had fun with some more camping activities, stay tuned for those posts.
     Have you ever done a daytime camp out?