This is the fifth straight day of rain in New England. It all started in New Hampshire on Sunday.

It’s probably the pinata’s fault.

My flower pots (not planted yet, thankfully) look like swimming pools for mice.

We all have cabin fever.

We’re spending much of this summer in a 22 ft camping trailer that we’ve got parked on the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border, close to where Tony has job contract.

Summering in a camper is big fun. Campgrounds are a hive of summer fun, from swimming pools & playgrounds to paddle boats and softball games. This particular place even has an antique fire truck that gives rides on Sunday afternoons. They play candy bar bingo on Wednesdays, participate in craft day on Thursday and make a new set of friends every week as folks come and go on their summer vacations.

Spring rain in a camper, is not as much fun.

Especially on day five.

Imagine taking all of your kids into a double walk in closet and staying there for most of a week.

What do we do in the rain, on day three or four, when the novelty has worn off? Here’s a partial list:

• Read (LOTS of books)
• Have a movie afternoon (or two!)
• Play board games (Pahrcheesi is a hot one this week)
• Listen to new music
• Do science projects
• Draw
• Work ahead on school
• Make shrinky-dinks
• Bake cookies
• Have guests over (yep, our friend came and spent the night Wednesday, what’s one more?!)
• Pray for sunshine

It has to warm up and dry out in New England eventually. Doesn’t it?!

A pinata seemed like a great idea when it was dry and relatively warm on Wednesday; the perfect gift for two kids in the same family who celebrate birthdays within a week. The perfect fiesta for 13 kids to share. Unless it rains.

I can’t even tell you how hard it was raining.

The teenagers strategized that if we put a blue tarp on TOP of the deck and then hung the pinata in the covered space BELOW the deck that we MIGHT be able to be dry (er).

This was a good thought, but it didn’t work.

Snapshot:

• Rain pouring down
• 13 kids in various stages of drenched
• Some in raincoats their size, some in raincoats for kids four years older than them
• Some barefoot and in soccer shorts standing in a mud puddle
• Some huddling under the dry
• Most talking loudly about how to best hang, swat and deploy the contents of the pinata with a minimum of candy wasted into the mud

Hannah and Jeremiah held opposite ends of a plastic table cloth beneath the limp pinata, dripping colored water from the drenched crepe paper, in hopes of salvaging the candy.  It didn’t work.

If our Christmas pinata, in Guatemala, was the ultimate in pinata joy, dry, in an idyllic garden, then this pinata might be a contender for the ultimate failure: flooded, ankle deep in mud, shivering in a northern rainstorm.

The kids will never forget it, of that I’m sure. Lois & I will never forget it: she banged her shin hard on the mower trying to find a dry spot to stand in the garage and I spent half an hour trying to dry out the candy using a salad spinner (surprisingly effective, in case you ever decided to drown your pinata!)

The rain is supposed to let up by tomorrow. We hope so, as the Mussler family from The Great Family Escape is coming down to camp with us. It will be an “edventure,” either way.

As we slog through morning #5 of drippy skies, I leave you with our favourite grey sky banishing song, Can’t Stand The Rain by The Rescues

**Photo by Bryan Powers of our little friend, Judah enjoying a mud puddle at the campground during a rain storm last summer!