Backyard Camping Trip

Every summer, we make a “Summer Bucket List” at the beginning, and try to mark as many of those things off as we can during the summer.  My girls LOVE camping, and always want to put that on our list.  Well, with me being super pregnant and Jason busy with work, there just wasn’t going to be a time to go “for real” camping.  We decided to improvise and have a backyard camping trip, which we have done before and always love!

I don’t know if Jared remembers “camping” any other year, but he was SO EXCITED for this camping trip!  The kids all were such great helpers and helped daddy put up the tent.

Once it was up, it was hard to keep some little ones OUT of it!!  We probably could have put them to bed right then!

The kids continued being good helpers and brought firewood so dad could start our fire.

Then we roasted our hot dogs and ate our yummy dinner.

After hot dogs, we needed treats!  We roasted starbursts,

Made banana boats (yummy!!)

AND made S’mores!

We probably didn’t need all three, but since it was our one and only camping trip, we splurged!!

We sang some campfire songs while we waited for it to start to get dark.  Then we played some fun games with glo-sticks!  We had a ring toss, and some “hide-and-seek” type of games that we all had a blast playing.  Then we made different creations with our connectors.

Once it was finally dark enough, it was time for SPOOKY STORIES!  This was a pretty funny end to our night.  We started off with really mild stories, because we didn’t want to scare our kids, but they kept begging for scarier and scarier ones.  Jason finally told some super creepy ones and they still insisted they were not scary enough!  We were slightly worried about nightmares, but our kids did fine, and they continue to tell some of the stories weeks later! 

Finally, we all snuggled up in our tent.  I didn’t get pictures the night before, but I did get some of us in the morning.  It was kind of a crazy windy night and our tent kept blowing down on us, but we still loved our night of camping!

We had a fun breakfast outside to end our little “trip”.  Yummy blueberry pancakes!

 

I am so glad we are able to have fun little adventures with our kids, even if we don’t leave home!!  We loved our camping trip, and hope we can go camping “for real” next summer!!