Camping with a toddler

We went camping this past weekend.  It was fun.  It was tiring.  There were rough patches.  There were cranky patches.  There were happy patches.

We just bought our little trailer a couple of weeks ago, so we weren't sure how well it would work for us as a family.  Mike and I had been more than a little nervous about camping with Ethan.  We had planned on tent camping (it's all the equipment we had when I booked the campsite), but the trailer sort of fell into our laps and it turned out to be really worth it.

We have to use Mike's car to pull it, which isn't too much of a problem except that it doesn't have air conditioning.  It is a Pontiac Vibe (so not much bigger than the trailer).  Here is what we looked like on our way to the campsite:

We set up as soon as we got there.  It probably would have taken about 20 minutes, but as all the parents of toddlers out there know, in reality it took about 1.5 hours.  Ethan was busy cranking the trailer down, running in and out of the kitchen tent, and trying desperately to figure out where he was and why he was there.

He was into EVERYTHING that first day.  With camping being a new experience for him, he was checking everything out and getting into lots of trouble :)  We were a little rusty at the whole camping thing too, so the first night was pretty much a Gong Show.  Ethan didn't get to sleep until 10:30.  He was not sure about sleeping in the trailer at all, and we forgot to bring Tad (his lullaby music playing frog).  He eventually fell asleep, and Mike and I enjoyed the fire until about 12:30 or 1, then we went to bed.  It started raining at about 2 am, and we had stupidly forgotten to close the roof vent on the trailer, so it dripped rain onto the bed.  Mike wasn't too concerned, because it was on my side :)

Ethan fell out of bed 2 or 3 times.  The bed isn't too far off the ground, so I wasn't too worried (but of course I still worried).  The first time he fell he was still sleeping, so I just put him back in bed and tucked him as far away from the edge as I could.  The last time he fell out of bed (at 5:33 am) he was up for the day.

The second day went WAY better.  It rained in the morning, but we went for a drive, then took a family nap. After we woke up we went to the beach:

The beach was another "new" thing for him.  We went last year, but he doesn't remember.  He was a little nervous about walking on the sand, and then a little nervous about being in the water, but he obviously got over it.

In the evening after we ate, we had Smores.

So all in all we had a great camping trip!  I'll post more pics and stories in a different entry.