camping

We love camping but haven’t been able to do it much since having the kids. In fact, I haven’t been camping since I was pregnant with Josiah.  Ken has taken Josiah twice which has been great but I’ve been biding my time until we could all get out there together.  Last weekend we finally had a free moment and great weather.

We just went to Lockhart State Park which is about 30 minutes from our house because when camping with such little ones it is good to not get too far away from home base.

As you’ll see from the pictures most of what we did was eat.  We got there and Ken, our camp chef, immediately went to work starting dinner.  I started in on setting up the tent.  The kids made stick collections and ran up and down the hill.

We ate hotdogs, chips, and fruit.  Unfortunately, most of the state is still under a burn ban because of our continued drought so we couldn’t grill or make a fire, so we had to do all cooking on our camp stove. 

Since we didn’t have a fire we couldn’t cook our smores the normal way either.  But they were still tasty.  Audrey wasn’t sure what to think of it but ended up just eating the graham cracker with the melted chocolate on it.

One thing the kids thoroughly enjoyed were two glow sticks Josiah was given long ago from his Nana and Papa for the next time he went camping.  There was lots of dancing and begging me to take more and more pictures of them.  Too bad I didn’t have a tripod.  They played with those things forever.  I’ll have to remember to always bring some when we camp.

Afterwards we got ready for bed and headed into the tent since it was already dark and there wasn’t much we could do sitting in the dark.  If we had had a fire we would have stayed out longer, but hopefully we can do that next time.

Since it was still a bit early we pulled out the laptop we brought and let the kids watch a few minutes of a dvd wet.  I know, I know, we are out in nature, but it was fun to do in the tent together.

We knew it would take longer than normal to get the kids to go to sleep since they sleep in their own rooms and Audrey in a crib.  But after 11 pm when they were STILL up and active Ken took them for a quick car ride to knock them out.  Thankfully, they slept till about 8 am but with the sleep they were lacking, there was definitely some grumpiness the next day.

In the morning, Ken cooked us pancakes, bacon, and eggs.  Yum.  Josiah helped with the mixing.

We then packed everything up and headed over to the little playground.  After playing there for a while we took a short walk on one of the hiking trails.  It was really pretty.  We collected pretty leaves and ran into two snakes.  The first one was a tiny green snake and the next one was either a huge cottonmouth or another type of water snake.  Either way I am very glad it slid away from us and into the creek.

So, it was a quick and pretty simple time but that is about all we are prepared to do with a 1 and 3 year old.  Both of them did great.  The only hard part was getting them to go to sleep.  I can’t wait until they are a little older and can do that easier.

When we got home we glued the leaves we found onto some paper and decorated it a bit.