Camping With a Baby: Yay or Nay?

In theory, it sounds like a fun family adventure...

A quick internet search for the phrase “camping with a baby” will bring up 312,000 results.

Some camp-with-baby guides are glorified spon-con for places like REI– Here’s how to camp with a baby, and– wow!-- conveniently, here are links to where you can purchase gear that will make that experience better.

Some camping-with-baby content is of the sort of middle-of-the-road, obvious advice that stops just short of “if a bear is chasing you, don’t throw your baby at it,” churned out by parent-specific publications that mostly exist to sell ad space for disposable diaper brands.

Other camping-with-baby resources are outdoorsy mom & pop blogs that look like they were put together with a defunct publishing tool, like Livejournal. The parents usually have the exceptionally toned and tanned and freckled faces of people whose adult lives have been punctuated by smiling next to signs announcing mountain summit elevations. These are people who own their own child-sized rock climbing gear and have a favorite whitewater rafting spot and run ultramarathons and possibly even spelunk. These people are too advanced to be dispensing advice on basic family wilderness activities.

The problem with all of the adventure baby content out there is you can’t trust the internet (she said, on the internet) for something as individual as camping with a baby. That’s because the question I had to answer for myself wasn’t really could I camp with a baby, but rather should I camp with my baby specifically.

I wanted to believe that I both could and should camp with my baby. We even went so far as to agree to meet some friends who have a slightly older baby to go camping recently, which in my imagination would directly lead to us having an outdoorsy child, maybe even one who knows how to surf.

But when we got to the campsite, I realized that I had not thought this through at all, and I should definitely not go camping with our baby. At least, not yet. We had everything we needed: food, shelter, a place to cook, a source of light– but even with the best laid plans, something deep in my animal brain told me that we weren’t ready to camp with our baby just yet.

Here’s what I didn’t think all the way through:

Camping is already a bit of a crapshoot, because so much can go wrong that is totally outside of your control. If you’re staying in a hotel and the air conditioner in your room is not working, hotel management can give you a different room or send somebody up to fix it. If you’re camping and it is 95 degrees out or pouring rain, there’s no recourse. What are you going to do, ask God to fix the thermostat? You’re the idiot who decided to go camping!

Babies, too, are their own form of chaos. Even under the best of circumstances, there is a chance that Juniper will just be having a bad time, and then, by extension, everybody will be having a bad time.

We hadn’t planned on where or how she would take naps. The tent, sure, but how would we contain her within the tent? She’s now advanced enough in her movement that she’s able to roll around and grab at things and, while chances are slim, there was still a chance she could figure out how to collapse the entire thing on herself.

Tents, by the way? Not at all soundproof. This is something that everybody knows if they’ve ever shared a campground with a horny couple who thinks that because people can’t see them means they also can’t hear them. Crying babies are also disruptive, and there was no way for me to be even moderately confident that Juniper wouldn’t spend half the night crying and disturbing everybody else on the campground.

Nature is mostly dirt. Did you know that babies eat dirt when given the opportunity? I did, I guess, but it didn't immediately occur to me before I set Juniper on the ground for two seconds and turned around just in time to witness her shoving a handful of gravel into her mouth, looking at me as though I had given her the idea, and crying as I used my pinky to fish hook them out one by one.

She's at an age where she can't reliably be contained without getting screamy but at the same time possesses a high-level ability to focus on the most dangerous thing in her immediate vicinity and attempt to mess with it, which means that one of us would have needed to be within leap's reach of her at all times.

For these and other, closely-related reasons, we didn’t unpack our tent. We stayed with our friends until the sun had gone down and the campfire was our primary source of light and we could no longer justify keeping Juniper awake and then checked into a hotel that was a five minute drive away. It was for the best. No more rock eating. I got some sleep. The baby didn’t wake up the whole campground.

We’ll try to camp with the baby again one day. But maybe we should try beta testing it as a family activity by pitching a tent in the yard first.

Image via Shutterstock