Camping: Baptism by Fire!

My husband and I would really love to learn the secret to camping with children. But I'm starting to learn that secret is: There is no secret. It's just hard.



I thought that it would work well for us this time. We had the boys security items packed. We had a tent that offered them their own room. We stayed close to home, so we could just run and grab things. But camping still found us all on the slight side of miserable. And, though I kept hoping the experience would turn positive, we ended up driving home at 3:00 in the morning when the boys wouldn't stop crying.

There are a few things I beg to ask of the camping gods.

Why is it that whenever you go camping it has to rain? I can't figure this one out.

And what are you supposed to do with a crying child in a tent? People cannot only hear the crying child, but also the yelling/crying mom.



Next time I think we'll stay a little bit closer to the bathrooms. Sometimes I can make it through the night, but sometimes I'm up 2 or 3 times. A trek to the bathrooms in the middle of the night is not fun when pregnant.



I can deal with the whole dirt thing. I understand that when camping there is a different standard of clean. But what I can't deal with is the same thing as always: the unpredictability. I thought having your kids on a good schedule was supposed to make things like camping easier. Even though my boys were both starting to get sick it just doesn't seem like it should have been that hard.

Well, even though we have no idea how to make things work better while camping, we would still like to give it another go.

Next time we'll add these to our list of what we need to do:

-Bring a stroller, so we can walk the boys around the campground when they won't sleep.

-Try to go camping with grandparents so there is more then one adult per child.

-Stay more then one night, so we can all better adjust to our surroundings.

-Bring along the boys CD player.

-And (though I wish it weren't true) bring both playpens. I really wish that traveling wouldn't require bringing two playpens along. Let's hope that we can switch them to a toddler bed fairly easily, and not have to worry about playpens for them anymore.

If anyone has any helpful tips please share. We'd really like to take more camping trips in the future. I would just also like to keep my sanity.