Camping with a 3 year old

Here is a secret:  Camping with a 3-year old is awesome.  

You think it's going to be really hard and horrible--  that it's going to take too much planning and that your kid won't sleep, and that she'll be falling in rivers and getting eaten by bears and bugs, and that she'll throw tantrums the entire time because she'll want to play in the fire and eat poisonous berries.  

Well, at least that's what I thought.  

But then, as we were getting ready for the trip, I started to notice how excited V was getting--  just completely consumed with excitement, in that way that is, I think, unique to kids.  She was excited to drive a long long way and listen to music in the car.  She was excited to sleep in a brand new sleeping bag in a tent and pack her own little tote bag of toys and animals to bring.  She was excited to have a camp fire and toast a marshmallow and brush her teeth under a tree.  

I think maybe this is what separates taking a 2-year old camping from taking a 3-year old camping--- 

They are able to anticipate and get excited.  There is this mental capability that exists that just isn't there in younger kids-- they are suddenly so interested in adventure and learning and exploring, and understand basic activities (like sleeping and eating and cooking) as facets of life that can be thought about and done in different ways (like the idea of cooking our dinner outside over a fire basically blew her mind)--and this is what camping is all about, after all, for any of us.  

Well, maybe luck was with us, but really everything went so incredibly well.  Violet spent the entire trip having fun making leaf bathtubs for her my-little-pony, and finding stumps to climb.  She slept legitimately well (ok you guys, she slept until 7:15 one morning; that's a good 2 hours past her average wake up time at home). Maybe it was the 4 mile hike?  Or the residual comforting smell of campfire smoke in her sweater that she wore night and day... I don't know.  It was like some perfect dream that I never imagined could actually happen.  And she took it so seriously.  --Like she knew we were out of our element (or maybe finally in our element?) and didn't get into trouble one spec.  

She was just this little fun person, wanting to help out the whole time, and enjoying her vacation away from home.  And I think Tyler and I both got this flash of how great things are going to be as she grows older and we get to share more and more of the things we love in life with her.