I wonder if there are boys out there who aren't obsessed with fire. This weekend at an annual camping trip with friends, the boys gathered 'round the fire with sticks and paper. They dipped their sticks into the fire just enough to get the tips burning... just enough to write their names in smoke hanging in the air. Before I could even finish my dinner, the paper plate was snatched from my lap and thrown into the fire, along with the napkin and any other random paper products they could find. Today on the way to school, the boys wanted fire stories. I'm a girl. I don't have that many fire stories. I told them about the time 3 huge firetrucks showed up at our house when we called the fire department to tell them we smelled smoke in our house. Dressed head to toe in their gear they scurried through the house in search of the "hidden fire." Must be the fireplace ashes you smell, they said. Not the fireplace ashes, I thought. Imagine my surprise when I opened the dishwasher the next morning to have my nose pick up the strong scent of burnt something. At the bottom of the dishwasher sat a charbroiled wooden spoon.
The only other fire story I could remember was when my high school boyfriend and I started a blanket fire at a picnic. The boys weren't very impressed with the story, but were rather concerned about the aforementioned boyfriend, who wasn't their daddy.
I hurriedly moved the conversation to favorite memories of the camping weekend. Fire, they said. They were referring to the times they tried to start a leaf on fire with a magnifying glass and the sun. They also mentioned the boring hayride as a fun memory (yes, they used "boring" and "fun" in the same sentence), going through Wolf Cave at record speeds, tossing the football, hiking to the falls and finding geodes and the general adventure of climbing the rocks around the falls. It brought out the cave dwellers in all of us as we tried our hands at hieroglyphics. I'll try to download some pix soon, if Bret's computer cooperates. You just can't tell the boys if you see pictures of me and my dark-haired friends donning long, blonde wigs. There was no reason for the wigs, really. Just trying to spice things up by telling our husbands that we left to get extensions and our hair dyed so we could wash their feet and dry them with our thick blonde locks. They didn't know what to do with us. And our kids were a bit frightened, and some were even annoyed at the embarrassment of it all. So, don't tell if you see the pictures sometime on this post.