Camping Labor Day Weekend

After the Buckeye football game on Saturday we loaded up the car and went camping for the first time this year. Where did the time go? When we bought our new tent in the sales this spring we were so excited to go camping every hour mother nature would allow and all of a sudden I turn around and it's the end of the summer!

Prior to departure, Jack helped me make his favourite breakfast - pancakes. This was until he ate sausages this weekend, and now his favourite breakfast is sausages. Oh how fickle they are! Hearing him say "sausages" is much more fun than "pancakes" though.

We love this campsite. It sits on a picturesque river that is great for fly fishing, so Craig made the most of it and ended up catching close to 20 fish all in all! This gave me and Jack time to mooch about the campsite and wash pots - boring to me and you but a treat for a toddler.

There was a buckeye (conker) tree on the site too - so we brought down the nuts and cracked the shells and got ourselves a stash of shiny new buckeyes for the football season.

At night it's so dark at the campsite that all of the stars are really bright. We saw a shooting star and the Milky Way too.

Last time we camped we took the pack n play but we gambled and bought him a sleeping bag this time. The second I unwrapped it he was in like a rat up a drainpipe, saying "mine mine" until his own voice got thin. A roaring success then I'd say!

The campsite pond looks lovely doesn't it? Take it from me - it's muddy, slushy, dirty and full of big bitey fish. Okay they didn't bite, but only because the water was so dirty they couldn't see my bum. Every time I walked out a big cloud of brown stuff came up from the bottom. UGH. The things I do for my child...

Lastly,

For those of you considering camping with an infant or toddler, please take my advice as we've been taking Jack since he was 6 weeks old and had some avoidable bad times. This time around it was so much better because:

* Forget the bedtime routine. It is impossible to put a toddler to bed before it is pitch black outside and they are so exhausted they can't speak. Fighting with them about it just makes everybody miserable.

* Pack LOTS of warm clothes and blankets. They seem to get cold much easier than we do

* If using a sleeping bag for the first time, be prepared to wake up a dozen times during the night, pull them back in/onto the bag and tuck in a blanket, because toddlers do some kind of overnight gymnastics only they are privvy to.

* Even though they don't sleep until LATE, as soon as it's light they're UP UP UP and away. The only way I can deal with this is to go to bed at the same time and hope for some sleep. This is easy for me right now because I'm pregnant. In the pre-preggers days I'd be up all night with Craig, star gazing, drinking wine and putting the world to rights.

* Waterproof the tent. There's nothing worse than your child & all their bedding getting damp overnight from condensation

* Take your own water for bottles and find some way to warm milk if that's something they are used to. We took our electric kettle so we could sit his milk cup in a tub of hot water for a few minutes. You may think "Pah! they are supposed to be roughing it when they go camping, not living in luxury!" but as a parent, I do everything possible to make mine and Craig's life a bit easier. And a whining child makes every parent want to jump off the nearest bridge.