Overnight Camping 2010

Since Mike was on fall break this past week, we decided to give it a go with introducing Anna Claire to car camping. We talked about where we would go--there are tons of state parks within a few hours  from where we live. Mike had initially wanted to go to Fall Creek Falls, which is a considerable distance away. My suggestion intuition was to go to Montgomery Bell, which is only an hour away. My thinking was this, if Anna Claire ends up being miserable, then we can pack up the car and be home within an hour, no matter what time, day or night. Let's just say there is a TON to be said for intuition.

We loaded up the car with the tent, food, sleeping bags, chairs and of course, marshmallows. The day couldn't have been more beautiful on Thursday. I even thought to myself, I'm going to have these great pictures and a great story to share on my blog! We arrived at the park, picked out a site and proceeded to set up camp for the night. We met the families who were in the sites next to us and during the conversations, Mike and I jokingly said, "if you hear our car start up in the middle of the night, you'll know it didn't work out and we apologize in advance." We took a walk, Anna Claire played in the leaves, all was good and right with the world.

We ate some dinner and then met up with some friends of ours from church who happened to be there as well. We headed back to our site, made some s'mores and put Anna Claire down to bed around 8:30. So far so good.


12:22 am. She wakes up.

For the next 4 hours, she proceeds to talk. Thankfully she isn't crying, she just wants to talk. "Mommy?" "Daddy?" "ABC's?" "Pray?" "Mommy?" "Daddy?" "Pray?" "Outside?" and on and on and on. She would be quiet for 5-10 minutes, then back at it again. She asked me so many times to pray that towards the middle of the night I was pleading with the Lord to just let her sleep. Sleep. Sleep.


Mike turned over and said he was sure she was a super-hero baby and no longer needed sleep. I laughed because if I didn't do that, I would have cried.

Finally around 4:45 she fell asleep.

5:15 am. Screaming. Mike and I trying to figure out what is wrong. She isn't able to be consoled. "Get her into the car so she doesn't wake up the other campers." Screaming. "Mommy's here baby." I get her into the car, she finally settles down once I have her wrapped up against me. She then proceeds to begin talking again. Mike, in the mean time, is throwing everything we brought into the car with no rhyme or reason. It no longer looks like we went car camping, it now looks like we live out of our car.

We are out of the park by 5:30 am. She finally fell asleep as we were turning into our neighborhood at 6:15 am.

She slept until 11:00, ate some lunch, then went back to bed until 4:30 pm.

Despite it being the worse never EVER (Anna Claire has been sleeping through the night since she was 10 weeks old so even during her newborn stage, it was easier than this), we're not ready to give up on family camping. We'll give it another try in the next few months, probably once it begins to warm up a bit.

We have to catch up on our sleep first.