One. The afternoon before our departure on our big camping trip, Aitch arrived home all excited because he had been in his babysitter’s pool. It was hot, and he was still shirtless and wearing his bathing suit. He raised his arms to demand, “Pick me up!” and I saw a huge lump under his right armpit.

“That’s probably just the way he’s built,” Husband said.

“I think I should take him to the doctor,” I said.

When the doctor came into the room, Aitch lifted his arm again and announced, “Look at my armpit!” I explained the situation and then immediately started apologizing, “You’ll probably tell me I’m an idiot and there’s nothing there…”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I can see that thing from here.”

Bottom line: One reasonable possibility is mono, since he’s recently been exposed via me. Since he had no other symptoms and no other enlarged nodes, and since a mono titer might not yet be positive, they decided to hold off on a blood test and gave us the go-ahead for camping. I am still nervous because isn’t this how Debra Winger got her final send-off in Terms of Endearment?

Two. We arrived at the campground, unpacked, and spent our first night without incident. That screaming? Oh, you heard that? That was Minor, in as foul of a mood as he’s ever subjected us to. For twelve hours, any kind of stimulus — annoying, painful, exciting, even pleasant — elicited a high-pitched shriek. I believe the chipmunks took up a petition to evict us from the campground.

On Saturday morning we went to a deli for breakfast (we were not as committed to the camping aesthetic as we might have been), and Minor took a digger off his chair. It was a bad one. I scooped him up and kissed the left side of his face, the side he had fallen on, relieved that there wasn’t a mark. Then he finally calmed down and turned his head and, good God, there was a HUGE white goose-egg on the right side of his forehead.

“He seems to be okay otherwise,” Husband said.

“I think I’m taking him to the doctor,” I said.

The walk-in care physician, who ran a practice out of his home, was amazingly on-site at eight a.m. when we arrived. He examined Minor and said there was no immediate sign of concussion, but he told us to be on the lookout for warning signs and gave us directions to the emergency room. Minor’s demeanor actually improved for a few hours, which worried me — was this the major personality change we were supposed to watch out for? — but soon he was back to his exceedingly crabby self.

Three. Meanwhile, I had hurt my back. On Thursday night, when I took Aitch to the doctor, it was a bit sore. I took a bunch of ibuprofen first thing Friday morning, but on Friday’s run it was killing me. It wasn’t just a pulled muscle or inflammation, but spasms. Spasms are the worst, because there are only two cures: time or muscle relaxants. Sometimes you can avoid them, because they only kick in when you try to move in certain ways, but as the day wore on the list of movements grew to include sitting and inhaling, two things I was certain to do on the car ride. Right before we left, I took half of a three-year-old (expired) Flexeril. They are always extending expiry dates for clinical trials; why not in my own medicine cabinet?

At first, it didn’t seem to have much effect, making me wonder if it had lost its magic. After a few hours, though, a kind of haze settled over me, and the knot finally started to unclench. The haze is sort of pleasant when you have nothing to do but loll in bed and watch bad TV, but when you need some level of alertness — say, when you’re preventing two children from damaging themselves while unpacking a car and setting up camp — it’s most UNpleasant. I was so irritable that I wanted to die, and yet I couldn’t muster up the energy to complete any task the way I wanted it done. I imagine that’s what it feels like to be in a deep depression: the kernel of your personality is tucked away there somewhere, but your body just sits there stubbornly like a great inert carbuncle, refusing to engage.

And the camping? In spite of all that, it was…okay. The biggest drawback was that our campsite was slightly remote from the others in our group. Not really remote in adult terms, but too far to allow the kids to run up the road to play with the neighbors without supervision. Some of the other families had arranged to be near their friends, so adults were able to hang out in a big knot at their campfires and drink beer as the kids played en masse. We took the kids on walks to visit their friends but always seemed to be interrupting their parents’ meals. Thus, the kids weren’t able to entertain themselves with friends nearly as much as we thought.

On Saturday, desperate to get Minor to nap for a few minutes before he detonated his afternoon cranky bomb, I took him for a car ride. He was still babbling happily when we came upon the Desert of Maine. This is perhaps the greatest roadside attraction in the history of tourism (it is a desert! in Maine!), so we had to stop. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me, and the camel is long gone.