I was in the Adirondack Mountains for the past few days, far away from internet access and a computer, but not wanting to ignore my intention of daily entries, I brought my journal with me. Below today's entry are excerpts…
We came back from our camping trip today (I still can’t believe my six-months pregnant wife wanted to sleep in a tent in the middle of the woods). We talked a lot on the trip about how much we’re looking forward to taking our kid camping; how we want to make sure they grow up unafraid of bugs and knowing how to go to the bathroom in the woods. I can already picture showing them how to start their first “no-match” fire with flint and steel. Apart from rare sleep outs in the backyard, I didn’t go camping until I was eighteen. My wife didn’t go until I took her after we’d been dating a few months, but we both look forward to it now – to opening our eyes in the middle of the night and seeing stars overhead, to waking up and seeing the first threads of pink in the eastern sky, to crawling into a warm sleeping bag on a cold night, to escaping all the distractions and complications of the indoor world for a few days and allowing life to just be about meeting the basic needs of food, water, shelter, and letting the rest of our time be all about whatever interesting thing nature throws into our path. In other words, we get to be kids for a little while, in the truest sense of the word. So, how young is too young to take a baby camping?
89 days until baby - we've passed the three month mark!
Fifteen months old was a good time for us. Before then, you have to haul the little one in a backpack or worry about him/her being on the ground and putting all sorts of horrors straight into the mouth. Even then, on our first adventure camping with our daughter in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Park, it thunderstormed for 24 hours straight!
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