Reilly Boone

(Could not get enough of the tent!)
We made it through our first camping extravaganza this weekend, and by extravaganza I mean one whole night, but for now.. it's all we need! Oh.. and by we, I mean Reilly and I, Jeff sat this one out, how nice for him. It cracks me up the amount of stuff required to take this kid anywhere, let alone camping..where one should be rugged and live off the land.. out of just a backpack, you know straight up Annie Oakley style. No! In tow on our one night camping trip was a playpen, two blankets, two stuffed animals, pajamas, set of tomorrow clothes, dex baby sound sleeper, sleep sac, toys, books, bjorn.. and then of course the diaper bag and all of it's usual suspects. However, I will say that my Dad brought their playpen so we didn't use ours, the sound sleepers batteries were dead, so we didn't use that, Reilly slept in the same shirt he wore up and sweatpants, did use the blankets but not the stuffed animals, so it's probably safe to say he could have roughed it.

(that little right hand corner is mine, the rest would be my high maintenance son.)


We were supposed to leave at 4:15 from my Mom's house, with Amy and Karen, but as usual, Amy was about an hour late and I had kept Reilly up through his second nap in hopes that he would sleep on the two hour drive, but now it was 5:15 and almost dinner time so he had to eat while we drove and stayed awake the entire time, then proceeded to stay awake until 10:00pm! In his defense, I did let him eat a marshmallow, which.. you try eating a ball of sugar the size of your hand and see if you can sleep! Not happening. And I didn't quite know how to put him to sleep in a different setting (my kid is ocd about his sleep.. CRIB only, no cuddling, no sleeping in my bed.. just his crib.) and how to put him down without disturbing the rest of the campers trying to enjoy some peace and nature (although, baby crying is natural!), so I just let him decide when he wanted to fall asleep and he decided around 9:45, making it the record for the longest period of time he has been awake, nearly 10 hours, 4 hours is his present max, but generally 3. Next morning he was bright eyed and bushy tailed at 6:45am, and didn't nap until nearly 1pm.. let's just say we got home on Sunday and now Wednesday he is finally getting back to his regular schedule. On the bright side.. he did have to sleep with me in the tent! Yay!

Not that you ever wanted to know so many details about him sleeping, but.. now you do. Aside from all of that, the kid LOVED camping! Loved every single part, loved standing in the playpen watching everything, loved the fire, the lanterns, the food.. everything. It was so hilarious to witness... definitely plan on doing this again in the next month or so. We went on a hike down to the river and he got to put his feet in.. loved that also, and played with sand for the first time. So much fun.. couldn't have had a better first camping experience. I'm pretty sure he was smiling the entire 20 hours (yes..extravaganza) that we were there, which made it easier on me as you can imagine how trying to camp with an 11 month old could weigh heavily on ones nerves, but it didn't, obviously.