Camp Songs

I just remembered that I forgot to tell you my favorite story from the camping trip! But, as is often the case with my stories, this one has a whole long back-story that I have to explain for it to make any sense. So here goes.

As a kid, I developed a complete obsession with whales. We're not talking about a simple sort of "Oh, I think whales are cute," thing; we're talking crazy obsession where that was pretty much all I ever thought about. Craig just began to understand this as he watched me sorting through boxes of stuff from my childhood while we were in Seattle. Whale calendars. Notebooks filled with every picture of a whale I ever came across in a magazine or newspaper. Letters written to Sea World asking how I could become a whale trainer some day. Glass figurines. Rubber stamps of whales. Stationery. Clay sculptures I'd made myself. Hundreds of drawings. Reports for school. Every box revealed more about just how much I lived and breathed whales as a kid. For years I planned on being either a marine biologist or a whale trainer (how I ended up as an English/humanities major is sort of a mystery, but that's how life goes sometimes).

One of these boxes contained a can with three bean-bag orcas inside it for juggling. I handed those out to the kids and for a few days, it was Bentley's favorite toy. He and Kendra had also been given killer whale shirts from Grandma Patrice. Yes, I'm hoping they will take up with my passion.

The icing on the cake was our plane from Seattle to Chicago: it was a Shamu airplane. Oh, yeah. The pictures we took of it aren't particularly good, but I'll put them up anyway so you can get the idea:

See? The plane on the left-- it's painted to look like Shamu. And yes, I noticed this from the little bit of paint I could see through the walkway as we stepped onto it. And yes, I was excited.

So, yes, orcas = big deal to me. (They are my favorite whales, along with humpbacks.) And now I'm making them a big deal to my kids, too.

So back to the point of this post, which has to do with our camp-out from a few weeks ago. When I woke up Saturday morning in my tent, Kendra was standing in her pack-n-play singing a song about killer whales. Which meant that I woke up to my sweet little girl, singing a tune that sounded approximately like Haydn's Surprise Symphony (told you I was a humanities major!). Unfortunately, she was so caught up in the singing, that she sort of left off the word "whale," so the lyrics consisted of, "Killer, killer, killer, killer!"

I snuggled into my sleeping bag and wondered if the other people around us (all members of our ward, mind you) could hear this and were worried about us at all...