The Not-So-Detail-Oriented Mother Goes Camping

From Wikimedia Commons

I've been blogging for the local newspaper for the past few weeks on their new "Greeley Moms" site. You can read my posts, and those of the other excellent mommy bloggers I'm keeping virtual company with here or here. I'm cross posting today to share with you all the very exciting way we're celebrating the end of our season.

I am doing something very unusual and also very nerve wracking this week. I am packing for a family camping trip.

Camping was a fairly important part of our lives before the farm, even after we had kids. We have backpacks we can live out of for 3-4 week trips, if necessary, and lots of gear, like a water filter and a mini-stove, that are very impractical in any other setting. But, like mountain biking and seeing friends socially, camping is a hobby we gave up in favor of growing food every summer.

Our last family camping trip was Labor Day Weekend, 2007. Our fancy backpack currently holds the propane tank for our flame weeder.  The last time we used our camp stove was to scald turkeys and chickens. Using these tools in their intended setting feels very unusual to me.

Since summer travel is no longer an option for us, we have resigned ourselves to the idea that our kids will be viewing our great nation's national parks and monuments during wintertime. They will have fond December memories, I imagine, of getting out of the car in a deserted parking lot at, say, Mount Rushmore, shivering at the overlook for two minutes, becoming hypothermic, and then scrambling back in to demand hot chocolate.

But I am personally not quite ready for that sort of trip yet, so we're heading to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks for the weekend. 

The packing is nerve wracking because I am not a detail oriented person. Even when we camped more frequently, we would sometimes (right, often) find ourselves with only two matches left in the box, or with plenty of peanut butter but no bread, or with some other difficult to remedy situation.

In case you're wondering, my lack of attention to detail is not limited to a camping situation. My kids more often use toilet paper than tissues to blow their noses. We sometimes sit down to homemade soup only to realize that I forgot to run the dishwasher and all the bowls are dirty. I lose my keys every other year. Don't be like me.

Being rusty at the whole taking kids camping thing, I'm pretty sure I'm going to forget any number of very important things. But luckily, my consistent lack of preparedness has made my family fairly flexible and resilient. I am pretty sure we're going to have a great time no matter what I forget. I hope. Wish me luck!