Shauna: Camping With Kids...

Hope everyone had an amazing 4th of July!! We went on a hike up Boulder canyon and had fun spending time as a family!

Well today I want to talk about camping with young children.

In May we went camping with our two kids.
and it was a disaster.

The drive to Rocky Mountain National Park was beautiful, we went through Estes Park (saw the hotel were The Shining was filmed).

Dave teaching the boys some good old fashion fire safty

Right when we got into our camp we saw about 5 deer and it seemed this trip was destined to be amazing.  It was pretty cold, but we decided we could rough it and just sit around the fire.

So as I mentioned last week, we love making homemade pizza on Friday nights on our pizza stone.  I read on Pinterest.com that you can bring your stone camping and place it on the fire rake and make pizza.  Let this be a lesson to you...not everything on Pinterest is real.  The pizza burned in about 30 seconds, out stone cracked, and some how our peel feel apart too, I don't know how this happened.  It was a disaster, but it was also a hilarious disaster.  So we picked off the pepperoni and used the peel as kindling.  

The boys got fussy early on so we ended up going to sleep at about 9pm.  We ended up all sleeping together on our queen sized blow up mattress...that lasted for about 2 hours.  Then one of our kids started screaming, and screaming.  Eventually Dave had to get up and take him to the car so we wouldn't wake up everyone in the camping area.  Eventually he found comfort in a Dora episode on the ipod and Dave ventured to bring him back to our tent, and he fell asleep.

I woke up about 30 seconds before the boys to see Wes asleep with his head on Clark's stomach, and Dave sleeping on the ground in his sleeping bag.  The boys continued to be fussy, so we quickly packed up our camp and left before we would have to face our neighbour and decided to drive around the park. It was so beautiful and we got out with the boys a couple of times, only to realized they were both getting fevers.  It was crazy. 



Dave and I talked after our experience and decided we just need to camp more and then things will go better. I'm happy to report that we went camping again last weekend, but this time it was a church activity (which means if people hear your kid crying, it's even more embarrassing because they know you! haha).  Although Wes did wake up at about midnight crying, it only lasted about 5 minutes because I had the ipod ready this time.  After a while he dosed back to sleep and all was well.  We had a great time camping, and the boys even enjoyed it this time too!


These are things I feel every parent camping with little ones needs to remember:

• Practice camping indoors
• Get the kids excited and talk up how fun it is going to be
• Invest in a battery operated fan or noise maker
• Bring kid friendly food, and lots of it
• Make activities for the little ones
• Stay enthusiastic, no matter what
• Be prepared for potty accidents and fevers
• Bring something that you know will help them fall back asleep with they do wake up in the middle of the night 
• Know that if you get frustrated and stressed out so will your kids.  Come what may and have fun!!