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An In-Tents Weekend

New carpeting really stinks, as in, smells bad. Looks great, absolutely fabulous, but smells like a solvent factory. It isn't enough to say that the old carpeting was bad. It was so dirty it was colorless; it was so dense with grime that it trapped light in its gravitational field, leaving rooms hopelessly dim despite the high-wattage bulbs.

The new carpet solved this problem, visually, but it caused an air quality issue in our home due to a phenomenon called "off-gassing," a phrase which is pretty self-explanatory. So we decided to go camping for the weekend and get some fresh air.

I love to go camping but I am still not much of a camper. I have been on many trips, but always with other people who know what they're doing. I do know that there must be a campfire and it is my duty to poke at it with a stick, attempting to rearrange the logs just perfectly, and never giving up until the fire is dead. The closest I ever came to camping as a kid was watching Fess Parker as Daniel Boone. If I really wanted to rough it I'd eat a bowl of cereal over the sink while I watched the show.

Packing for baby is pretty easy, since you have become used to packing a survival kit every day. You can't go anywhere without a backpack filled with diapers, wipes, plastic pants, a plastic bag for trash, extra clothes, a handful of small toys, a sippy-cup, a few jars of food, a baggie of little snacks, a first aid kit, a week's supply of water, a cell phone.

Getting on the road is the hard part. It is usually necessary to make many last-minute dashes back into the house after you've actually reached the driveway and have the car doors open. Leaving the house with a baby is a time warp, and so is leaving to go camping. Their combined effect can send you spinning in a crazy figure-eight orbit with your front door being the center point. You shoot out the front door, thinking you are leaving to go camping, but you realize that you've forgotten to start the dishwasher, so your energy shifts and you arc over the top of the orbit and go whizzing back through the front door. While starting the dishwasher you realize you've forgotten the Scrabble game, so you grab it as you once again get sucked out the front door. This time your momentum carries you all the way out to the car, where something jogs your memory and sends you flying back into the house for the maple syrup for Saturday morning's pancakes.

A sufficiently absent-minded person can remain in such an orbit for hours. Each time you complete a circuit of the orbit and pass through the front door you hope to have gained enough energy to break free of your home's gravitational field. Do not try to estimate you time of departure without the help of an Astronomy PhD.

The great thing about camping is that you learn something every time and you get a little better at it. This time I learned that mosquitoes really like babies.

We arrived at our campsite in the late afternoon and the word must have been out on the mosquito grapevine because they were waiting for us when we got there. As soon as we stepped out of the car, they rallied around the fresh meat. Emma, in particular, was considered a delicacy. A cloud of them seized her and began to carry her off but we grabbed hold of a dangling foot and pulled her back.

But what do you do for repellent? You can't just douse them with the same stuff they use to fumigate houses. Most bug repellants have warnings about poisoning small children. We just whisked her into the tent, pronto, and waited for them to thin out after the sun went down.

They say that garlic is a good bug repellent, and that if you eat enough of it the bugs wont bother you, and neither will people. Must have something to do with off-gassing. Since it is a questionable practice to feed a baby enough garlic to repel bugs, I suggest you eat the garlic and just keep that baby hugged close against you as much as possible. You'll both feel so good you won't care about a few mosquito bites, and the garlic aroma will probably overpower the new carpet smell after you return home.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.