Getting outside with kids can be challenging. We’ll share some of our tried and true tips and tricks for making your adventures more enjoyable and less stressful for all. We’ll cover everything from easy camping meals and outdoor gear selection, to camping with newborns and toddlers, and adventuring outdoors all four seasons. We’ve built a DIY ski pulk sled, camped in freezing temperatures with our kids, done breastfeeding while hiking a 14’er with a newborn, and designed and built a custom roof rack for our SUV. We hope our experience and insights will help you get outside with your kids all year long.
It is rare for me to advocate “old school” over modern tech, but I’ve found a great method that I would like to share: waxing your polyester/cotton garments with good-old wax. I have taken to waxing my favorite Fjallraven Vidda Pro pants (this post will probably also turn into a
Every time we prepare for a camping trip, I (Karen) find myself amazed and annoyed that I still have not conquered some relatively easy tasks that would make trip-prep a heck of a lot less exhausting. Matt. of course, already has his system and has had it down for years.
A friend of mine bought the firestarter necklace that I recommended as a holiday gift idea, but told me that he’s having trouble starting a fire with it. So I made the video below, wherein I mash vaseline into cotton balls to make homemade fire starters, then light one with the
A few years ago, I had a bunch of random things to wrap for Christmas. Stuff that would not fit easily into boxes or wrap nicely. I went online and found this incredible hack for making your own gift bags out of wrapping paper. Maybe everyone already knows about this,
Two of the things I love most about homeschooling are how much I am learning and how the kids seem to internalize the most random information. In September, our Forest School group met up with Jesse and Johanna of Zia Permaculture to learn about local wild mushrooms and herbs. I
Everyone’s least favorite part of camping is packing all your gear. Matt has calculated that, no matter how much time we spend packing the night before a camping trip, it still takes us at least 3 hours to leave the house in the morning. And, almost always – though, in
POOP! I’m going to talk about POOP! It’s going to get real. Because I’m feeling like the honey badger tonight (“honey badger doesn’t give a ****!”). Yes, people have written plenty about shitting in the woods before. Few, however, will have been quite as detailed and as graphic as I
This post is about building your own custom first aid kit, or else improving the one you have. With three boys, we use the first aid kit far more frequently than back in the day. Before kids, I was much more cavalier about injuring myself. As a parent, I want
I’m big on navigation, and big on being prepared. For twenty-five years I have been using various navigation tools and trying to keep abreast of the technology. Knowing how to use a GPS well has saved my ass many times in the remote Utah desert, finding and escaping slot canyons.
Kind of a silly thing to write about but it’s been working so well for us these days, I thought I’d share. Generally, I prepare lunches for the kids the normal way – each kid gets a plate with all the same things on it. I decide what they eat
Last week, we were up in the Jemez Mountains, celebrating a friend’s birthday. A group of us hiked along the trail at Las Conchas, settling down about a half-mile in, on the banks of the stream. Between the six families, there were TWENTY-ONE kids 12 and under. A handful of
*In honor of the upcoming Memorial Day, I thought I’d add a post from May 2016* I’m not sure WHY we felt the need to go camping on Memorial Day weekend, THE busiest camping weekend of the year. We go camping year-around, so why we chose this weekend to
When our first son was only 7 weeks old (yes, you read that right), we decided to celebrate our wedding anniversary by camping in the national forest outside of Durango, CO. Since it was barely October – and our brains had been frazzled from lack of sleep – we didn’t