going back a bit- Independence Day

My sad little blog(s) have been so empty lately. July is almost over and we have done a ton this month that I want to be sure and cover here. That means I'm going to go back in time to catch up on what I haven't posted yet, starting with the 4th of July.

Normally for July 4th we are camping. This year we decided that we'd skip the family trip as we really weren't up for the challenge of camping with two kiddos, one being a crawling baby. With the holiday on a Wednesday, the rest of our family didn't go camping either.

Our plans were up in the air until the day of. We live close enough to the pro rodeo to see their fireworks, so that was our "plan" for the evening. Ben + I were so excited to see Kai's reaction to fireworks this year that we knew we had to keep him up past dark, which has been SUPER late.

After naps that day we ended up going out to my parents' place for a swim, and s'mores.


Then Malakai did his first ever sparkler and we all watched a very noisy fountain firework



Later we joined Ben's parents at a family friend's place for more fireworks. Their house is in a wide open space where you can see several other firework shows.


Desmond eventually fell asleep snuggled up in some blankets with me and Malakai spent some time with grandma making up games during the fireworks. Overall it was a low key and very enjoyable day.

Roughin' it...the do's and don'ts of camping with baby

We just returned from our holiday weekend camping trip yesterday. We camped for 3 nights and 4 days out on the Oregon coast just south of Florence. We usually go to Carter Lake, but this year we needed more space with extended family coming and bringing their RV so we found some spots at Tahkenitch Landing and Campground.

This was obviously Malakai's 1st camping trip, so there was a lot of preparing to do. It was especially interesting as we had to prepare for no running water or electricity. Although, I'm used to not having electricity while camping {I mean, how is having outlets really camping?} but we usually have some sort of water source if even for just rinsing off.

I was surely not prepared for just how much we were going to have to bring with us until I started packing it all. It took me all day on Friday and we ended up leaving 2 hours later than originally planned. Partly because Ben didn't get off of work as early as we hoped, but mostly because of all the stuff required to take our baby along! Thankfully we were able to borrow my in-laws Tahoe. Ben made the point that there's no way we could have gone in just our little Neon.

Once we got on the road Malakai fell asleep, thank goodness! We were only driving about 90 minutes, but just 30 seconds of baby screaming in the back seat kills me. Once we arrived we were once gain taken by surprise at how tiny the sites were. The host told my parents that each site could hold 10 people, we were CRAMPED with just 6 of us on our lot. My aunt + uncle had the RV site next door which is where most of the tents got set up, except ours and the pop-up my parents stayed in.

So to summarize the rest of the trip, here's my do's + don't for camping with a baby {little disclaimer: I've obviously only done this once and my family, baby, as well as our conditions are all unique, I'm not claiming to be an expert in any way!}.