Thirteen Things I Love about Camping:
  1. Getting up first thing in the morning and starting a fire
  2. Cooking over an open flame
  3. Sitting around the fire, throwing random things in to watch them burn
  4. Sleeping under the stars
  5. Roughing it
  6. Coming up with creative ways to keep children busy when they're bored: "Hey, everyone, let's do a Nature Scavenger Hunt"
  7. Bringing Elmo camping with us
  8. Enjoying nature and not worrying about getting dirty or wearing clean clothes
  9. Going to a place where there's no internet, phone calls, or email to answer
  10. Home made ice cream
  11. No television
  12. Sharing the woods with raccoons
  13. Learning about insects and other living creatures first hand

Thirteen Things I Hate about Camping:
  1. Smelling like a campfire three days after you get home
  2. Ingesting enough smoke to make a fire fighter wince
  3. Screaming at children every six and a half seconds for getting too close to the fire
  4. Getting up at 4:00 am and tripping over tent poles in the dark to put the rainslip on the tent because it started to rain
  5. Walking back and forth to the bathroom from the campsite approximately three thousand, six hundred and seventy-two times with children who cannot coordinate the functions of their bladders and/or bowels
  6. Huddling under a rain canopy and playing cards when it's too wet to do finish the scavenger hunt and they can't find "a nut"
  7. Trying to clean Elmo off at the end of the camping trip when you know you should just throw him away but if you were to do that, Hell on Earth would be unleashed
  8. Licking your finger, running across your children's foreheads, and leaving a clean spot
  9. Going to a place where there's no internet, phone calls or email to answer and then watching four teenagers and adults spend all their evenings calling girlfriends and playing on FaceBook (Also: being jealous because I do not also have an iPhone)
  10. S'mores
  11. No television
  12. Woodland creatures who come into the camp and steal your chocolate bars
  13. Pulling ticks out of your kids' hair