Camping with Baby

This afternoon we're off to another wedding ('tis the season!). Before we go, I thought I'd finally report on last weekend's wedding, Mike & Kristi's:

We headed to northern Minnesota for this wedding. For Simon, this meant a chance to get behind the wheel at one of our stops on the way up...

...and getting an open-air diaper change on a picnic table at a rest stop. We've found that a lot of establishments are good about having diaper-changing stations, or counters big enough to attempt a diaper change, but those features are still most often in the women's room only, so Andy has to get a bit creative sometimes to find space for diaper-changing!

Mike & Kristi's wedding was held at Camp Emmaus. Everyone invited to the wedding itself was also invited to spend the whole weekend at the camp, and activities were planned for Friday night through Sunday morning. We wanted to go for the whole shebang, but were a bit intimidated by camping with a 5-month old...and then we thought, why not? What better situation to try out camping than when there are lots of friends around who can help with the baby, and a nice camp set up with actual buildings, restrooms, etc.? So off we went...


Here Andy and Simon are checking out the location to set up tents. There were cabins available also, but they were dorm-style and each housed 11 people--we thought we'd rather not burden others with our crying-multiple-times-a-night baby, so we opted for setting up a little home of our own. I think we were both expecting more people to opt for tents, but it turned out to be just us and one other couple.

There was a lovely double rainbow that first evening (you can only see a single rainbow in this shot)--and there's our tent (borrowed from Andy's folks). Dome sweet dome ;).

Turns out the only thing I forgot to pack for Simon was a warm hat for him to sleep in--luckily, Andy had a bandana along, and we found it made a great hat for Simon in the evenings and chilly mornings, until we switched to his sunhat during the warm afternoon. That first night went pretty well--you know, Simon woke up about every 2 hours, but that's been his usual recently, so we can't really blame the camping. He was warm enough, we were warm enough...one un-anticipated issue was getting him to sleep, though. Being farther north, it was relatively light until after 9 pm, and in a tent, you don't really have anything to block out that light--sure its shaded and not directly letting sun in, but there's no way to "turn out the light" either.

When sleeping, we had to do an alternative style of bandana wearing, so Simon didn't have a knot in the back of his neck. We called it his Aunt-Jemima-do. The bandana, tough-guy look (non-Jemima-style) was big hit among our fellow campers.


We got some great use out of the Peapod! Here Simon used it as a shaded, bug-free playspace during the Saturday afternoon ultimate frisbee game. At night, we took out the air mattress and sleeping bag that come with the peapod and used them as his bed, right next to our camping mattresses and sleeping bags.


The wedding itself was later Saturday--here is the happy couple at the reception! Dinner was fantastic, and I hear dancing was a hit as well, though I missed out on it as I took Simon back to the tent to go to bed. A couple hours after Simon and I left, Andy came to check on us and watch Simon while I traipsed to the women's bathroom to get ready for bed...and that's when it got interesting. First, we heard weather sirens from a nearby, but not terribly close, town. We had heard these the day before once, too, and nothing came of it. Not two minutes later, though, someone at the camp was ringing a big bell. I walked out of the bathroom to pouring rain, a suddenly pitch-black sky, and big gusts of wind. Where to go--the tent to make sure Andy and Simon aren't there, or the lodge? I started running for the tent, but didn't get very far, as I heard Andy calling out to me "go to the lodge, I've got him!" So I turned around and ran for the lodge, Andy and Simon catching up to me in a couple seconds. And so we dashed, through pouring rain, heavy wind, in the darkness, with clanging bell and tornado siren sounding, our baby cradled against his daddy's chest, across the camp to the lodge.


We, and a few others taking a walk by the lake, were the only ones outside at the time of the tornado siren. Most everyone else just walked down to the basement from the reception, in their dressy clothes, some carrying wine bottles down in case we were there for a while. Meanwhile, Andy and I were soaked--he still in his wedding clothes, me in my pajamas, and looked (and felt) a wreck. We got Simon back to sleep eventually (difficult to do in a crowded room full of chattering wedding guests!), and he seemed no worse for the wear--he hardly even got wet, since Andy had grabbed his whole sleeping-bag-bundle in the dash from the tent. I, however, really was a wreck--it took quite a while to get my heart rate back down and to stop worrying that my precious baby might be whisked away in a tornado!

Luckily, the folks at the camp were kind enough to let us crash on the floor in that basement room, after the severe weather passed and everyone went back upstairs to resume the party. Andy went back to our tent and got our things, and we three 'camped' on the floor in our sleeping bags. It was loud with the reception going on right overhead, and took me hours to fall asleep, but I didn't mind that a bit. I just lay there and stared at our little wonder, fast asleep, unaware of all the excitement.

Despite the tornado warning, we would definitely say our first camping trip was a success. Just look at how much fun Simon had getting dressed for the wedding inside our tent :). We just hope that the next time we venture out to travel or camp, we won't have such an eventful story to tell. (By the way, no tornado actually came through, just heavy wind and rain--if we'd already been asleep in the tent and didn't have sirens and bells going off, chances are we would have slept right through it and never been the wiser.)