Excerpts From Camp: Day Five

WARNING: This post contains immense amounts of potty talk.

While being on an island for a week, one must learn to live primitively. For the most part. There are luxuries such as a propane stove, a home-made ginormous cooler (my grandpa is 99% pure genius) that substitutes quite nicely for a fridge, a hand crank water pump that draws in the lake water, beds to sleep in, and a wood stove to keep you warm on cool nights. (Yes, I consider those things luxuries up to camp.)

One of the hard things to get used to, though, is the bathroom facilities. There are three, in fact. The ladies have a pee bucket in the boat house. But we must remember not to throw toilet paper in it, due to it's lack of disintegration. (Go ahead...ask me how much t.p. I fished out in one whole week from my forgetful girls.) However, if we ladies feel the urge to do more than just wee, we must venture on to the true outhouse. But, again with the whole toilet paper situation. The boys just get a hole in the ground to wee into; and of course the use of the outhouse when necessary. I'm thinking they have it pretty easy. For my girls, the week of bathroom use is always extremely confusing. I would see them rush to the outhouse, only to retreat out and rush to the boat house, then come out and stand in between the two with a confused look on their face, and then run back to the outhouse again. Sometimes our delicate weaked-vessel bodies just don't know which to do first. And we certainly can't force our bowels or our bladders to work on command. Nor can we stop them when they start. In case you needed to know. The whole back and forth thing went on for several days.

On day five our whole family ventured into town for a night out. Our plans included feeding the ducks at the local duck pond, dining on pizza and getting some groceries. After we fed the ducks about five pounds of bread, we moved on to the grocery store. It was then that things went downhill. Hubs stomach instantaneously turned, and he spent more time in the bathroom than in the grocery store itself. He did not look well at all. And once we were back in the car travelling to the restaurant, Kaytlin's tears began flowing about her belly. And then I was reminded of how many outhouse trips Jillian had taken earlier that afternoon. While our family was eating dinner (and frequently visiting the restroom), I was piecing together the "mystery of the mysterious runs". It occurred to me that we all only had one thing in common...the tea in the breadbox.

You see, up to camp, those who temporarily reside there often leave some of their things behind for the use of others, or for their next return. Tea and coffee is one such item. In the breadbox at camp, Hubs found this delicious tea that four of us tried, and loved. It was so yummy. It was in a plastic zip-lock bag labeled "Nature's Tea". Hmmm. Nature's Tea. If it's from nature, it can't be all that bad, right? After our dinner we hopped back in the van (okay, some were dragging themselves back in...) and I decided it was time to do some googling. Thankfully, we had a laptop and wi-fi internet was abundant in town, so I got to work on my research. When the results came up, I burst out laughing. Nature's Tea is "a natural blend of Chinese and American herbs used as a colon cleansing type laxative." Lovely. We were all cleaning out our colons. My poor kids. I have no idea if it was even made to be used by children. We'd been sipping it like lemonade.

Fortunately it's affects only last a few hours. But I'll be honest...it's brutal. It's a good lesson learned: don't eat or drink the unknown up to camp.