Like many small children, my daughter just loves camping. Like many tired parents, I am no fan of camping. It’s not that I don’t love nature. I do love nature. We hike a lot and we go to our cabin in the summer time. That’s all good. However, hiking involves minimal preparation time, and while our cabin involves a lot of packing, once we are there we can cook with ease and sleep in a bed. Our cabin does not involve epic amounts of packing over several days for a short trip, cooking that takes many times as long to create burnt food, sleeping on the ground and waking up every hour due to discomfort or the loud music of whoever is next to us, or the screaming of someone down the beach, or because my daughter needs to pee in the outhouses that are very, very far away. Yes, I’ve become somewhat middle-aged about this whole camping thing, after telling myself that I was going to be the Mom Who Loves Camping. Maybe I need to eat more marshmallows.
For the record, I’m more keen on wilderness camping than I am on family-style, just-out-of-the-city camping, but I’m too chicken to try that with a small child and a chronic illness. I may get there eventually. Most people I know camp with a trailer, but our car is too small to tow one. Me, I’m stuck with the poor lady’s trailer – pre-packed Rubbermaid boxes.
Our solution this summer has been for my daughter and I to go on one-night camping trips together at a local camp site that is only a 45-minute drive away. It’s close enough to bail and come home if you need to, like we did last year when fork lightning started hitting the ocean in front of us. That was a wee bit too exciting for our taste.
Our other solution is one that you may have tried. If not, I’d encourage it. My daughter has been camping in our yard. Now, unfortunately (or fortunately), this does not involve sleeping in a tent. Our yard is too full of yowling cats, fighting raccoons, new baby skunks and the occasional coyote or bear to try that. I’m serious, I think that we have more wildlife here than at a camp site. However, she and a neighbor have been setting up a tent and sleeping bags on the front lawn, having hot cocoa with marshmallows, and telling stories and playing games in the tent. This seems to fulfill the small child urge to go camping, at least when you’ve done a few small trips already.
Do you camp with kids?