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Camping out with 15 or so under-10 year olds is a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is simple enough: they keep each other busy and entertained. Aside from having to occasionally telling them to stop climbing walls or some such, they’ll just move from one game to the next or one activity to the next.

The curse is that getting any sleep is an exercise in futility.

The basic timeline from lights-out (and there has to be a lights-out, even if none of them are in bed or even ready for bed) follows a pretty simple arc. For the first ten minutes, it’s bedlam. Kids laughing, farting, burping, hooting and any other thing they can come up with. After that, things start to settle down a bit. Kids who weren’t in bed are in bed, kids who weren’t ready are ready and one their way. It’s still loud, but all the craziness is becoming tamer. After about 25 minutes, it’s noticeably calmer. Most of the noise is kids fidgeting in bed. The laughter and jokes are quieter, and a couple of them are one their way to sleep. Finally, at the 40 minute mark, they are all basically quieted down and falling asleep.

But that doesn’t mean the parents get to sleep. Now, the room is a cacophony of heavy breathers, snoring, rolling on air mattresses and other noises of sleep. If you’re not asleep by now, there is no guarantee you’ll be getting to sleep any time soon. If you are asleep, the odds are you’ll be up for one reason or another: the strange environs, the unfamiliar rhythms and noises, a kid rolling over and farting in your general direction.

At that point, the arrival of morning is your best friend. Because the morning means you can go home and lie down on the couch to catch some Z’s, finally. But morning is a long way off, and, wouldn’t you know it, you come to the realization that your air mattress has a slow leak in it. Pretty soon, you’ll be sleeping on a hard wood floor.

But the kids had fun, every last one of them. So there’s pride in the knowledge you helped facilitate an enjoyable time for them. They don’t even want to go home. Of course, they got to sleep.