Cabin Life

As a kid I spent most weekends in the summer with my family at my grandparents' house "up north". The Cabin. It was glorious! I was in my swimsuit for 90% of the stay, could eat whatever I wanted, drink gallons of soda, play outside with the dog all day and stay up until the wee hours of the night watching nonsense on TV. This past weekend the hubs and I took Little Bear on his first mini-family vacation to a cabin and some not-so-romanticized memories came flooding back to me.

• The sand - Seriously, sand everywhere. So much damn sand. In every article of clothing. In Little Bear's diaper. In the diaper bag that I barely even used while we were there. The only thing more prevalent than the sand was the...
• Sap - How is there sap on every surface!? I would walk across the kitchen floor and somehow step in a huge drip. Are there pine trees in the damn cabin!? Where is this shit coming from!? At one point there was a giant glob on the inside of my arm. I'm ghost pale there. Sunlight doesn't even reach there. How the eff did sap get there!?
• The water stank - What IS that!? By far the worst thing. I remember hating that smell as a kid and it was so much worse as an adult. I'm guessing part of the reason is that the pipes at our rental are used much less than the pipes at my childhood cabin were, the other reason is that I now have to use the stanky ass water WAY more. Dishes. Bathing the kid. (Nearly impossible to do without him catching on that the water smells and then being anti-bath. Smile and scrub. Push through. Don't react!) Cooking. Rinsing stuff. Making coffee. (Which we eventually ended up using four bottles of water for. Sorry earth.) Washing my hands/brushing teeth. (Let's be real, we all know we do those things way more now than we did as kids.) I actually gagged while doing dishes. Pathetic, I know. I can change a blow-out diaper or be vomited on by my kid but cabin water stank almost makes me hurl. I didn't even bother to shower while we were there for fear I wouldn't make it out without puking on myself. Yep, I would rather be full of my own nastiness from 2 days of 90 degree weather and lake scum than suds up in cabin stank water. Worst part, the smell is everywhere. We stopped at a diner an hour or so after starting the trek home and both the hubs and I smelled it there too. Luckily we noticed it AFTER we had plowed through our omelets.  
• Bugs - Somehow ok when I'm up north? A spider crawls up our bedroom wall at home and I scream for the hubs or feel all creepy crawly for an hour. At a cabin I simply nod props to the spider for having such sweet digs and we both move along with our day. Honestly, it was more his home than ours so who am I to stomp him dead?
• Fish - I'm pretty sure I used to fish off a dock using corn from a rusty ass can I dug out of my grandma's cellar. It had probably expired in 1982. And I ALWAYS caught fish in no time. Little Bear's grandma got him a fancy new pole (which the hubs and I totally stole), fancy fake bate and fancy Spiderman bobbers. We caught two fish. Tiny ones. It was sad. Little Bear still thought it was fun but the hubs and I felt slightly robbed. 

Apart from those things, the trip was lovely and totally worth doing again but at least next year I will be more prepared for aaaaaall that.