It's been a while since I wrote a travelogue, mostly because it's been a while since I went anywhere. It was just one night, but it was still noteworthy as the kids first camping trip.
Kids enjoyed the tents, but unfortunately it was muddy the first day so we didn't get to run in an out of the tents like they wanted to. We were with an organized group, and there were official kids activities, some of which we could participate in (blowing bubbles), but others which were not really age-appropriate. We actually got there too late to participate in the official bubble blowing, but there was some leftover bubble stuff and we did that for a while by ourselves. It was good we were latecomers -- it rained the first day and we got to miss that!
There was a story hour, and the first thing that was read was "A Giraffe and a Half" by Shel Silverstein, which is actually pretty cute, and very in keeping with the sorts of things that they enjoy, so I thought it would be good. However, Perry got kind of distressed about the whole activity because Mommy wasn't reading the book. I had to draft somebody to help me get Jocelyn and all of our junk down to our campsite while I carried Perry, who just wasn't consolable. As soon as we got back to where there was a pile of familiar books, even though it wasn't anything resembling "home", he latched onto a couple of books and just sat down paging through them all by himself quietly, and everything was better after about 15 minutes of that.
We had to stay away from the campfires, and there was a drum circle that scared Jocelyn so we had to stay away from there as well (it was around a campfire so that was pretty easy, except I wanted to go cajole someone into making me a S'More :-) We brought SuperYard fencing, and ended up putting some of it around a cooking fire at the big communal tent, but mostly it wasn't needed.
In some ways it was just like staying around at home; the things we did were read books and run around and play with toys. There was a bit more outdoors running around than usually at home, but still it was pretty familiar to them.
They had no trouble with sleeping in unfamiliar locations, which for them really means waking up in such a location, because we put them to sleep either nursing or on our shoulders and then put them down. When we fed them at the big communal tent, we just had them run around and come get pieces of whatever we were eating, but we usually do that at parties or barbecues, so that was a familiar way to eat.
The eating of dropped potato chips out of the mud tried even my tolerance for dirt, though.