Camping with a Tubie

Making Olive's breakfast at the campsite. She did most of the work.

It's hard to say what possessed us to make camping reservations for Memorial Day weekend, but back in December while hunkered down on our couch amidst a cold, Minnesota winter, we did just that. This was of course before we knew I was pregnant. I don't think I would have signed up for a camping excursion had I known, but since we had already made the plans, we decided to stick with them. Camping and spending time outdoors is something that Dain and I did quite often before Olive entered the scene, but the last time we went camping (for just one night in Mount Rainier National Park) was coincidentally when I was pregnant with Olive. Camping with a tube-fed kid possesses some unique problems as we obviously need to travel with her food and all of her supplies and be able to do dishes, but we decided that we can't let Olive's tube feeding hold us back at all. You only live once, right?

Carting everything and a hitchhiker back to the car.

We reserved a cart-in campsite in Lake Itasca State Park for two nights over the holiday weekend. That seems like a really short trip. Yet, it is amazing how much preparation can go in to just two nights of camping. We surely underestimated the sheer amount of work it would be to prep for our brief trip. Thankfully we mostly had the items we needed except for a large water container. We just needed to sort through all of our camping gear that had been sitting dormant in our basement for years and figure out exactly what we needed to bring as far as supplies and food and just in case items. For Olive's birthday, we gave her a sleeping bag so she was all set on that front. The most important preparation, that I would suggest for all kids the first time they sleep in a tent, is that Dain and Olive did a dry run in our backyard the weekend before we planned to venture off the homestead. Mostly to ensure that she didn't freak the freak out in the middle of the night. Surprisingly, she did great. Of course she went to bed late and woke up super early, but that's to be expected when you are on the sun's time. She was exceptionally excited to wake up in a tent.

Backyard camping at its finest.

With one night under our belts, we decided to go forward with our plan to cram our car full of stuff, drive three and a half hours north, and live it up in the great outdoors. We have a Subaru Outback, and I will say that it does not seem very big with three people and a whole bunch of stuff. A car top carrier is definitely in our future with another one on the way. Since we were basically car camping, we really just brought everything we ever thought we could possibly need. And then a few more things. We each had our own bag with clothes. Then we had a big duffel with our tent, tarps, sleeping bags, etc... We had some miscellaneous items like camp chairs plus two large plastic totes with kitchen supplies, fire supplies, dishes, etc.. Then we had a variety of bags. One with towels. One with blankets and pillows. One with sleeping pads. Plus Olive's backpacks (one with daily supplies and one with her comfort items for the tent plus a few books.) And we had a medium sized plastic tote with all of Olive's food and feeding supplies, bottled water, wipes, and hand sanitizer. The last items into the car were a medium sized hard cooler and a soft-sided small cooler bag packed with milk and Olive's lunch and snack. Just a few things.

Olive downing a milk box like a big girl. No more baby bottles.

On Saturday morning we made all of Olive's food for that day and pre-loaded syringes so that all we would have to do is grab them out of the cooler. It made it a lot easier while traveling and setting up our campsite. We then decided that we would bring all shelf-stable foods for the following days so that we didn't need electricity or ice. For breakfast, we packed fruit and yogurt pouches (Earth's Best and Happy Baby/Tot are our favorite) along with pre-ground Grape Nuts to make a breakfast blend and milk boxes, which are one of the most convenient things ever for us. Olive loves to drink milk too so we always need it with us. Thankfully Organic Valley makes single-serve shelf-stable boxes of whole milk. It means we don't need a cooler with us. It's nice to have one to put the leftovers in but not an absolute necessity. We packed plenty of snacks for Olive too as she loves to eat mini m&ms, goldfish crackers and mini Nilla wafers. And for tube snacks, we bring Happy Tot greek yogurt pouches as they are high-calorie and easy to tube on the go since our o-ring syringes fit right in the top making it simple to load them.

Olive's dinner al fresco.

In addition, for lunch and dinner we packed Real Food Blends for Olive. These have been life changing for us since they make it possible to provide Olive with a tube diet of real food without the hassle of having to bring our blender and all of our ingredients with us when it's not convenient....like when camping or staying in a hotel. They make three varieties with just a handful of healthy ingredients, and they don't require any refrigeration until after they are open (if you need to save leftovers.) So while we did purchase ice from the park office to keep our leftovers cold to reuse the next day, we didn't absolutely need to for our camping trip, which was nice to know. For tube fed kids on feeding pumps, electricity would obviously be a must, but at least in Minnesota, most state park offer electric sites. For us, with a tube-fed kid that doesn't use a feeding pump, it was completely doable to be without refrigeration or electricity for a few days. We also typically tube one syringe of food after Olive goes to sleep to get in extra calories, but we decided to forego that while camping, especially in light of the fact that she occasionally throws up when she coughs and she had a slight cold over the weekend.

The lovely dishwashing station.

The hardest part was doing dishes. We do so many dishes every day, and it's not exactly optional. Olive's feeding supplies (syringes and extension tubes) are expensive and in the case of the syringes that make tubing a blenderized diet easier, increasingly hard to find. So we use them as long as we can and prolong their lifespan by meticulously washing everything after we use it. To make this possible while camping, we purchased three dishpans. We kept our used feeding supplies in a plastic bag in the cooler throughout the day, and then tackled them all together after dinner. It helped to sort of pre-rinse each syringe and tube after we used it throughout the day by shooting water through the tubes and sucking in and squirting water out the syringes a few times. That way, there wasn't a ton of residue sitting in there all day.

Soaking dishes at the campsite.

To do dishes, we heated water on our camp stove and filled the first tub with warm, soapy water to let everything soak in. The second tub had clean, cold water from the campground. The third we filled with boiling hot water after heating more water on our stove, in order to sanitize the dishes after rinsing them in the second tub of rinse water. Then we placed them in a container lined with paper towels to dry in our car overnight. It was a meticulous three step process, but it worked really well. The campground had potable water from a spigot that we used for dishes and our hot chocolate/coffee in the morning, but for Olive's tube water and our own drinking water we simply packed a case of bottled water in the car. And in full disclosure, Lake Itasca is a pretty swank state park. It has a lodge. With a dining room. That serves beer and wine. And we totally did that two nights in a row for dinner.

The burner.

For our first camping outing with Olive we just thought it would be too much to try and plan camp meals to cook. We brought snacks for ourselves and a few containers of yogurt in our cooler for breakfast. And we obviously made s'mores over the campfire. Olive is an exceptional marshmallow burner, but don't worry, we were close by to put out all the fires. And then she'd ask for another one. Definitely more of an activity for her, but we wanted her to get the full experience. Because what is camping without s'mores?

Olive kept her toys in the "beer box." Almost as critical as the food.

The food and dishes situation worked out really well. It's not easy to stay clean while camping, and we are pretty strict about general hygiene when it comes to handling Olive's food and feeding. We carry hand sanitizer with us and had lots of wipes. That seemed to work well enough. The campground also had a shower building with warm running water so it was possible to get a little cleaner. I took one shower on the second day, but for Olive we just gave her a wipe bath and put on fresh clothes. She pretty much gets dirty the second you clean her anyway.

We obviously also travel with extra supplies and a small emergency kit with an extra g-tube, that would allow us to replace Olive's tummy tube in the event that her current one fell out or malfunctioned in any way, which I should point out has only happened three times in three years. But it sure catches you of guard when it does. I'm an over-packer to my core, as Dain will be happy to tell you about, and for me one of the most stressful parts of traveling with a tube-fed kid is my engrained fear that I will forget something. I always used to think to myself that everything is replaceable (while going over my packing list for the tenth time) so it would be ok if I left something home, but when you have medical supplies that you need, you can't just pop into the Walmart down the road and buy extension tubes. So it helps to be organized. I check and double check to always make sure we have the items that would be difficult to replace while traveling. We keep a bag with an extra syringe, extension tube, and pouch of food in our car. And Olive's day bag has her emergency tube kit.

Olive in the Mississippi River headwaters.

Other than medical supplies and tube-friendly food, we basically packed what everyone else would with a young child: pull-ups and wipes (yes, we are still trying to potty-train); extra ziplocs/plastic bags; way more outfit changes than you could ever imagine needing; a bin of outdoor toys (purchased from our favorite dollar section at Target mostly); sleep essentials (for us it's a growing hoard of blankets, stuffed animals, and a plastic bestie named Twilight Turtle); more wipes (because kids basically just roll around in the dirt); hand sanitizer; a kid-sized camp chair; beach towels; extra sleeping pads/pillows/blankets to make sleeping comfortable (especially for the pregnant lady); snacks; a clothesline to dry wet clothes; bug spray; and sunscreen. This list was helpful in preparing.

The coveted bucket swing.

The best part of our weekend is that I can truly say that Olive loved every minute of camping and spending time at Lake Itasca. On Saturday we spent time at the Mississippi Headwaters. The water was obviously cold so we just planned to wade in up to our ankles. Olive of course had different plans and took a little swim. She is an all in kind of girl. Through and through. On Sunday, we rented a pedal boat on the lake and then rented bikes to ride on the many miles of paved path in the park. One of us rode like a granny. One of us silently judged the pace. And the third fell asleep in her Burley trailer so it was a successful outing. Yet even with that excitement, we are pretty sure she could have stayed at our campsite all day. We were within eyesight of the playground, and the bucket swing is one of Olive's greatest love affairs. She could spend hours on it if anyone had the patience to push her for that long. We don't. We meanly draw the line around the twenty minute mark. Dain joked that we could have just spent the weekend at the park two blocks from our house on the bucket swing. Possibly true.

Serving drinks from the "beer box."

She also had an obsession with the "bear box" as we called it or the "beer box" as she called it. I told her a few times that this big, brown box was a "bear box" to keep bears and other animals out of our food. A few minutes later she yells, from within the box of course, "hey dad, do you want a beer?" Then we hear, "hey mom would you like a root beer? No. It's not your favorite." Seriously. The girl spent most of her time at the campsite inside the beer box, which at some point also morphed into the girls' bathroom in her imaginary world. If Dain tried to get in there, she would shriek that it was for girls, obviously not for daddies. I'm sure our neighbors loved us. Who wouldn't like to wake up to "Happy Birthday" being belted out at 6 am and the hysterical pleas of a three-year old who needs to change out of her pajamas within three seconds of waking up? We picked a cart-in site thinking it would be secluded, as our previous campsites have been in other state parks, but not at the Bear Paw Campground at Lake Itasca. Our campsite was about a hundred feet from our car and in clear view of many other sites. Not our favorite, but it all worked out.

Out on the lake in our rental "Dazzle."

The only thing I wish that we had is a family tent. We have an awesome backpacking tent. It's a 3-person tent, and it is lightweight, breathable, and roomy for two people and two backpacks. It's basically the perfect tent for a young couple. Add in a kid, however, and you seriously question your decision making skills in your former life. Obviously five years ago camping with children was not on our radar, but a monstrous family tent is pretty much where it's got to be at for family camping. Or a camper or R.V. if you're really fancy. Our 3 person tent worked out ok, but add in another child, and it won't be possible. We will have to upgrade to a "campground palace." A screen tent would also be nice. But for the whole 36 hours we spent on our camping adventure, we had plenty of stuff. I asked Dain his thoughts on the weekend and he replied that it was "worth it." I agree. It was worth it. Traveling with a tubie is intimidating and camping was no different, but we are glad we did it. It was memorable, and I would encourage any families out there with a tubie to not be afraid to try it.

Mississippi Headwaters.

We were originally going to stay for Saturday and Sunday night, but on Sunday night as we were heading to the lodge, we decided to pack up our campsite after dinner and head out that night instead of in the morning. The main reason is because heavy rain was imminent. And the thought of packing up soggy stuff in the morning in the rain wasn't that appealing. Plus, in total honesty, the combination of having not slept the night before and finding a tick on my thigh that Dain had to remove after Olive and I walked back from the bathroom with her screaming "Dad! Help! Mom has a bug on her!" at the top of her lungs was bringing me close to my tipping point. So at 7:30 at night, after an hour of speed packing and one last go on the bucket swing we hit the road. Thirty minutes in, the rain started. We didn't get home until almost midnight, but I was happy to carry a warm, sleeping bundle into her own bed and then crawl into mine. A perfect ending to our foray in the woods.

Nicer parents would have given into the repeated requests to take "a little swim in the lake."