Camping

This is a very overdue post seeing how we went camping at the end of July.  But it has been a very busy summer with lots of family visits and hot hot days!  So let me tell ya how our camping adventures went.  

We packed up the minivan and headed down to Bar harbor to stay at Hadley's point campground for our first camping trip as a family of 5.  On the way down we picked up our new tent that we ordered from LL Bean.  We are really happy with it and pray that it will last us a long long long time.    

Once we were all set up our awesome friends (Simon, Alex and their little guy Theo) showed up to spend the long weekend with us!!  We love these guys so much and had such a blast camping with them.  Knowing how busy I would be with 3 kids, Alex did all the meal planning and most of the meal prep!  Did I mention how much I love that girl. 

Alex did a great job of searching lots of different blogs to come up with our camping menu.  I was smart enough to start my own camping board on pinterest so I could collect different recipes for future reference.   I will do a different post on the camping kabobs but here is just a little sample of one of our meals. 

Bar harbor is really beautiful!  One place we really enjoyed was playing at Sandy Point Beach. 

The water was extremely cold but that didn't seem to stop the kids from having fun in the waves.  And the view there was breath taking. 

After playing in the waves we packed up and headed off to find a nice spot to have a picnic lunch.  

If you were to ask Eben what he loves about camping he will say candy cereal.  Only when we go camping do we get to eat a variety of sugar cereal.  

Of course with the cereal we did enjoy these delicious greek yogurts with fruit.    

One of the days it rained so Alex and I went shopping.  These were my 0.93cent sunglasses I bought from the super wal-mart! hehehe.  Jaelyn really likes them as well.

Abraham was a great camper and helped daddy do a lot of the BBQing! 

We all survived the long weekend of camping and had a lot of fun!!  

A few things we did learn

1.  When camping in the states don't forget about the time change.

2.  Bring DVD player for kids to watch movies in the morning cause they are up really early in a tent.

3.  Smore's are best done in the morning with small kids so they are not full of sugar and all gooey right before bed.

4. Be prepared for rain (coats, umbrellas, and a shelter)

5.  Camping close to swing sets or play grounds is great for kids

And the last thing we learned was that it awesome to be intergenerational and to camp with other people.  We were two couples with 4 kids in total.  Sometimes I had to be nursing during meal prep or clean up.  Also the kids want to play and can be cranky right before meal times so it was so awesome that Simons brother (Ben) and girl friend (Sarah) joined us.  It was nice to have extra hands to help out when needed.