A few years ago my daughters Destiny and Trinity and I went camping with a group from my church and a few other friends for a weekend. The weather was perfect. We packed up my little Toyota Celica and went down the road. This was our first-ever mother-daughter camping trip.

When we got down to our spot, we unpacked my car of all of the stuff and started putting up the tent. This was a tent that I had never put up in my life, so I really had no clue what I was doing. I got everything laid out and was walking around it thinking, “How am I going to do this?”

My daughter Trinity kindly asked me, “Do you know how to set up the tent?”

I thought about it and said, “No.”

At the time, she was convinced she was going to have to sleep in the car for the weekend. We lucked out because friends that were staying with us must have seen the look of confusion on my face, and they helped me put up the tent. My daughter was happy that she wasn’t sleeping in the car.

Next, we blew up the air mattress, which went great. All the kids there thought I had the coolest place to stay, so they all hung out in my tent. But when I went to bed that evening, the mattress was about flat. Naturally, I didn’t sleep very well.

The next night I had an air mattress that was completely blown up, crawled into bed and my daughter had to go to the bathroom. So late at night, we have to walk all the way up to the bathrooms in the rain.

At the end of this trip, we had a lot of lessons learned and a lot of laughs. Can’t wait for the next tenting trip.