1.      Nature- Nothing will teach your children to respect wildlife and the importance of keeping wildlife in its natural habitat than seeing it firsthand. Most of the state parks have lovely campsites that are ranger monitored as well as having naturalists on site. They have free programs for kids like owl walks in darkness to listen for animals. They also have seasonal events and activities focused on specific species.
2.      Get up and move!!- Nothing gets your kid moving like having to jump on a bike to get to the flush potties…
3.      Family unity- Sitting around a fire and actually talking to your kids with no electronic distraction, no peer distraction… just you. You really get to know your kids if the distractions are taken away and they really TALK to you.
4.      Slow down…- Camping has the magical ability to take the rush and hectic of day to day life out of the equation. Time slows down. It is good to just breathe…
5.      Working together- Forced to put up tents, make meals, start fires… your family is forced to work as a unit in a way that modern life has almost eliminated. It helps to reaffirm that unit.
6.      Community- A strange sense of community is created between yourself, your kids and the other campers at the site, even for a stay as short as a weekend. Again, modern life has almost eliminated this need for community in our day to day lives, so finding it at a campsite is refreshing.
7.      Scary stories- What kid doesn’t like sitting around the fire and telling or hearing creeptastic tales of gore and monsters?
8.      Planning- Kids learn the valuable lesson of planning when the only resources that you have are those that you brought with you.
9.      Fresh air makes everything taste better- Yeah. I don’t know why. But it does.
10.  Smores- One of the many things that taste better in fresh air and over an open fire.
11.  Dancing in the Streets- A boom box and dancing kids… need I say more?
12.  Mosquito bites- I don’t know why, but my nine year old insists that they are an important part of the experience…
13.  Memories that last a lifetime- When your kid is thirty something, they aren’t going to look back at their childhood and say, “My mom bought me a 3dDS. That meant so much to me and made me a better person.â€Â But camping? This is the stuff of warm fuzzy childhood memories. Sunburn is forgotten, mosquito bites only last a little while… but the memories of being together, warm sun shining on your back as you laugh hysterically at the fact that little Jimmy just swallowed a bug in their juice? This is the stuff that character comes from.
See ya at the campgrounds!!
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Virginia Nelson spends her days chasing three very active kids around. When she is not doing this, or plotting taking over the world, she likes to write, play in the mud, drive far too fast and scream at inanimate objects. She can often be found listening to music that is far too loud and typing her next fantastic tale of blood, sex and random acts of ineptitude. Romance, in Ms. Nelson’s opinion, is not about riding off into the sunset on the back of a horse with the knight in shining armor— it is about riding the dragon. If the knight can keep up… well, that is love.She lives in Northeast Ohio where she is usually buried in quite a large quantity of snow. She keeps from freezing by drinking large doses of coffee occasionally spiked with Bailey’s (depending on the scene she is writing or how many calls have come in from the principal of her kids school that week.)
Another excellent way to deal with the weather is to travel which she does with her friend as much as possible as they both enjoy making large quantities of money then blowing it all on trips to places they have not seen. Hot tubs look the same everywhere but who cares? They take the kids on all of these trips and point cheerfully at things like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls and listen to the chirp of “Can we go back to waterslides?” until they give up and go back to the hot tub while the kids look at water slides (which also look the same everywhere you go but who cares?)
Hobbies Virginia enjoys other than travel and writing are bowling (at which she is terrible), golfing (at which she is terrible), camping (during which she whines) and hiking (the one time she may shut up if you give her a camera.)
She is also collecting blackmail pictures of her kids in the hopes that one day they will all graduate both high school and college and then she can have lovely parties at which she proudly shows off embarrassing pictures. They will be updated here and on facebook as quickly as they are taken.
Her most recently published work is Odd Stuff, available through Sapphire Blue Publishing. The second book to that series, Siren’s Song is currently in the submission process. The third is about two chapters from completion at the time of this posting and is titled Odd Fate.
Other works in progress are Blood and Bones, a young adult paranormal fantasy that is a retelling of an old Italian fairytale and Necro an adult urban fantasy. She is also in progress on a contemporary piece at this time as well as continuing the Odd Stuff Series.
Ummm…not gonna happen. The most camping I’m willing to do is in a motor home. lol!
LOL…not much of a happy-camper.
Went camping a lot as a kid, but you can’t pay me to do it now. Of course, I live in the woods, so where am I going to go camping? LOL