Camping With a Baby

We took our not-yet-six-month-old camping last week. Yep, we’re a little crazy, but if you’ve been around here awhile, you already know that. Our four-year-old, Pumpkin, has been camping once before and did splendidly both times. This was the first trip for Babykins. We spent one night and had a ton of fun, but there are some things we’ll do differently, next time.

What we did right

We all slept together on a king-sized air mattress in a king-sized sleeping bag (actually, it’s two sleeping bags zipped together). This was so important for keeping the little ones warm on a cold night.
We brought a baby hanging jumper- the kind that hangs from a door frame. My idea was to hang it from a tree branch, but it took a few bungi cords and some acrobatics to get it right…We couldn’t reach the branch, so hubby had to climb. Hehehe

Oops. Too high… she’s about two feet off the ground!

Oops, too low!
Actually, she loved it like this, so we left it this way for awhile, then we managed to get the height right. Being in the bouncy swing kept her safe and she loved being able to see everything we were doing. Plus, it took up almost no room in the car! Isn’t she adorable?!

We brought lots of small chewy toys (she was teething– two teeth, now!) in ziplocs, for entertainment.
We brought more clothes, diapers and wipes than we needed. Better to be safe than sorry!
Since she is exclusively nursing, I brought nursing tops so that I could easily nurse the baby.

What we’ll change next time

We’ll bring a warm hat. It would have been much easier to keep her warm at night if her little head wasn’t losing so much heat!
I’ll bring my baby wrap. Being able to carry her hand-free would have been wonderful!! I expect it will really help to keep her safe when she starts crawling, too.

Honestly, I can’t think of anything else that we needed. Our only real problems were that the weather turned unexpectedly cold (too cold for staying another night) and the baby was teething, so she woke often from the pain. We hope to stay for several days, next time.

Here are some pictures of our adventure.