This year will be my first gathering. I want to know if it will be more enjoyable for my wife, kids, and myself if we bring them or leave them at grammas. They are 1 and 5 and I'm concerned with how well they'll do in the woods for a week. All advice and experiences appreciated.
id say it all depends on what your looking for out of the gathering.if your lookin for a family experience,its there,.. if thats what your askin.. in my opinion kids are what make the gatherings. there what its all about.. they are our future.. that bein said,, a 1 year old can be a handful,but theres always folks to help out.. i dunno, like i said, i guess it all depends on what your lookin for,,but hell ya can always dump them off at kiddie village for a day.. i dunno,,never had the pleasure.. love n light
I agree with hillbilly, that being said. I sometimes enjoy private times with my wife, and it could be alot of fun having them at grandma's house, no worrys. It just depends on what you want, kiddie village is fun. make sure you have a little extra food in case your childen get hungry in between meals. also know who you leave your children with, Kiddie village is not a daycare where you just leave your kids and go, it is a community where you can be apart of. having all of the communmity benifts one of them can be trading baby sitting. now you have to decide what you want all night drum circles, or ealy morning breakfest with the kids. you can try to have both that would be interesting.
Several reasons we probably won't be going to the Gathering this year, a few of them kid-related. We went to that attempted 4/20 regional in AR, and Cindy was miserable in the heat in April. Of course your older kid will also have to deal with the ticks and chiggers and poison ivy and fire ants and all those other things that make camping in the south in the Summer so much fun...but y'all are from Texas; heat, bug bites, and rashes just make 'em stronger. Are they used to sleeping without a/c? You'll definitely need a tent fan. Climate's really my big issue with the kid, (can't speak for DFly) no matter what S.E. seems to think. I understand there's no swimming hole on site? Or was that one of the altie sites? Go camping with your kid for a week in the South when there's no place to swim? That I just can't see...
i do know i had my kid in the woods a lot when he was lil..(never to a annual tho) i can say that keepin him sanitary was a issue at times. i mean ya cant let them sleep naked at that age,,unless ya want a mess in your tent.. an washin diapers out over a shitter ,,well....
diapers--yeah. I remember posting something along these lines to mariecstacy a few years ago...ummm...disposables, pack 'em in, pack 'em out, unless you can find a fire that's not being watched by too many highholies, then get it real hot, and burn 'em. Any Karmic ill effects you may incur from long term damage to the to the Planet by burning the plastic in the diapers will will be mitigated by the immediate benefit of not having your kid's fecal coliforms breeding in the hot Ozark sun. If you MUST leave used diapers behind, leave them in a dog proof container plainly labeled something like "Biomedical Waste--Dirty Diapers" and at least pack this out to a main trail, it your camp's out in the boonies. Cloth diapers you'd need to dump the wash water in a shitter, I guess? I ran into a woman in CO '92? WY '94? years ago...washing diapers at the spring pipe...ICKY POO!
OH MY...At THE SPRING PIPE? EEEEWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!! And please folks, don't 'dump' little ones at Kiddie Village, hang out, get to know some of the other parents & then arrange for a child care exchange where there is an adult specifically responsible for your child(ren)
I usually take my kids. They are 6 and 3. Pa is the only Nationals that I've been to without my boy. This year I don't get to take them and I will miss them soooo much. They love going to gatherings, Ashton, my boy was born in the woods and my daughter loves it. Diapers sucked, but we made it. I wouldn't trade my experiances in the woods with my kids for anything. I think that it made my children who they are. They are sooo wonderful to, and very smart. I think you should take them, you'll miss them pretty bad, but its your choice. Hope to see U there
thank you all I'm not too concerned about the elements. We are from the DFW, TX area so heat and humidity are nothing new, nor are bugs and plants. I believe we can handle the diaper problem and whatever else. We may only come for the 3rd to 6th or 7th. sweet pea, maybe we can let our kids play together
Mine are 7 and 4 now, and have been gathering in the woods for their whole lives. They love it, and since we're not doing the kitchen this year, they are excited to live at Kiddie World as they are calling it. I don't know where they got that name maybe from Disney World, but Kid Village, Kiddie Camp, is a great place to be. You can camp anywhere you want though and spread the joy your kids bring to the scene. I like to camp outside of Kid Village sometimes just for that reason. Anyway, I hate packing in an out diapers so I recommend heartily making yourself some cloth ones if you don't have them already. Here's the blueprint for rainbow vacation diapers: get clean cotton t-shirts (preferably plain white) and cut out the diaper pattern you can see in my gallery. One large t-shirt will make 2 diapers. Sew them up so they are two layers thick and add extra layers in the middle (in front for boys in middle for girls). You can get fancy by adding elastic to the middle edges too if you want so the diaper fits more snugly on the legs. Then you have to buy diaper covers and pins. (This method is cheaper than disposables anyway. You also want to bring two buckets to do your diaper laundry and some bleach and biodegrable soap. you can just throw any scary poo diapers right in the shitter and cover them and just wash the pee diapers. Just pull out the elastic if you are burying the diaper. You won't really want to use these when you get out, unless you get all excited about it, and then go for it because cloth diapers are great for kids as they begin learning potty training, and you can make fancy velcro closures so they don't have to manipulate pins. There is tons of info on homemade diapers on the net and why not use this opportunity of camping to learn more. PLEASE DO NOT BURN OR LEAVE DISPOSABLE DIAPERS. Wandering is being too generous, which I say you go guy if the folks know not what they do. But if you have read this far take charge of your corner of the world and Live Lightly On The Land. Loving you!!!!!!!!
bin Becca, I am certainly not advising anyone to leave any big, stinking, bags of used diapers for the cleanup crew. However, Murphy often causes even folks with the best of intentions to have to leave in a greater hurry than they had planned, and abandon things which they had every intention of packing out. I can also see how Murphy would be especially likely to plague a family with a kid in diapers. And I'm thinking of a cleanup where I had to deal with a bunch of diapers that were not left by a main trail in a dog-proof container plainly labeled "Biohazard--Used Diapers". I'm giving advice on how someone who might HAVE to do the wrong thing might be able to do it in the right way in this, the best of all possible worlds. I've read in survival manuals that if you're stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean, you can stay hydrated by eating fish eyes. I have never read that fish eyes should be substituted for water when water is available. I might be learning more about this---I mean diapers in the woods, not eating fish eyes---than I had previously thought. The seccond My Lady posted her thread about altie gatherings, quicker even than SE could call us cowards, she stated talking about a road trip to the Gathering. Her indecisiveness on this issue is leading me to believe that the mother of my child might be a woman cleverly disguised as a female....I guess I'll find out where I'm going when I get there.
Not sure what the disposible diaper scene is these days but if the cheap 'paper liner' diapers are still available, they can be separated & the innurds thrown in the shitter. This is NOT recomended for the diapers with the expandable weird bead thingys. we did cloth diapers when our guy was little, but we were also used to living in the bus & doing laundrymats once a week...
This discussion reminds me of a gathering we went to back when both my little ones were in diapers. We packed in our cloth diapers, fully intending to rinse and pack them out. It was in Nahantahala, and damp as heck, all the diapers were damp and Chrissy and I were trying to dry some over a fire when this most wonderful angel showed up. She said she owned a diaper service and gave us all the CLEAN cloth diapers we could need, and she took them back dirty!!! All we had to do was drop any solids in the shitter. It was the most amazingly easy time I ever had a gathering with diapers. That said, we have done gatherings with cloth diapers, and disposables, I think you need to decide which you can better deal with realisticly.
