Building a Campfire

Recently Tanner planned meals for a scout campout. He did a great job. He was very excited to go on the campout. One thing he was most excited about was building a fire. A couple of days before the campout Tanner came home from school and told me he wanted to collect wood from our backyard. He explained that he needed dry wood to build a campfire and that Dad would build a fire with him. I told him he could collect the wood after his homework was done. Unfortunately, Tanner got busy and was unable to collect the wood and the next day it snowed. Tanner gave it a day to dry out and then reminded Chad about building a fire. We had a free evening so we decided to give it a try.

We warned Tanner that it would be tough to build a fire because the wood was still wet, but he would not be deterred. So we all got on our warm coats and our snow boots and trekked out to the backyard.

The boys quickly found twigs and leaves that were dry. Tanner set them up and then set it a blaze. Well, actually it didn't happen quite that fast. Pretty much everything was wet and it took a while and several tries to get the fire to stay lit for any length of time.

Tanner started to get disheartened, but we encouraged him to keep trying. Chad kept the fire alive by blowing on the ashes and added little twigs. Once the boys saw this they all wanted to try blowing on the fire.

In the end, we were successful in getting the campfire lit. Unfortunately, it only lasted a couple of minutes. It was pretty cold, so we decided to stop for the night and try it again when it was dryer. We had a lot of fun and the boys learned some good lessons about building a fire. We are all looking forward to trying again really soon. Hopefully the weather will cooperate this time!