Princess Campout at Campland San Diego, June 2007, Part 1

Well, we had our last Princess event over the weekend; the annual end-of-the-year Family campout at Campland in San Diego. It's a "resort" campground, and we rent a pop-up tent-trailer for the weekend, and there's real bathrooms with hot showers, so the moms (and specifically, Daleen) will come.

Every year on Saturday morning, there's the Sand Sculpture "contest", where each tribe builds something, and is given some lame design-specific award for it. There seems to be an unwritten rule that those awards be as lame as possible, so even the youngest kids can see through the ruse. I've always wished that the chief/judges would at least try to make the awards less lame-jokey and more something the kids could be proud of: biggest, most creative, funniest, most realistic -- anything that could be taken as possibly referring to more than one entry. But I guess I'm done after 10 years, and I should just get over it...

For our first entry, 10 years ago, the guys (or should I say "boys"?) wanted to do a mermaid. This came out as you might expect, and I was feeling like it wasn't terribly appropriate, nor any fun for the kids, so I added a cartoon-ey octopus next to it. The cool part about the octopus design is that you can farm out each tentacle to 8 people or small teams, and everybody gets to contribute. They all look to me to do the finishing touches, but they get pretty close with just some guidance.

This time, I went for a more realistic style, and did more with the twists and curls of the tentacles than before. I had lots of help right at first, when I need a lot of sand moved into the main pile, so we had more finishing-touches time to do the eyes and get some variety in the tentacles.

It was an eventful weekend -- more tomorrow!