Jack's first backpacking trip

I have started to think when people say "you're brave" they actually mean "you're stupid" or "wow, I would never in a million years do that thing you just said." I got a lot of "you're brave"s from other young mothers when I first started talking about taking care of two babies in the fall through this care-swap thing. But more on that later. The most recent "you're brave"s I've gotten (I even got one "you're VERY brave") were from telling people we were taking Jack backpacking this weekend. My parents were hiking the Tahoe Rim Trail all last week and the plan was to meet them at the end of their trip and hike back out with them. Two nights, a little over two miles in, no big deal, really. So what if it was a very steep trail with a kind of unrelenting up-up-up. You can do just about anything for two miles. And Danny was carrying all our stuff-- I just had to take Jack. (Just little old 23 pound Jack.) This didn't feel brave, it felt utterly normal, and I couldn't believe that we'd waited this long to take Jack for his first camping trip.

When the sun went down on Saturday night, I remembered why we'd waited. We wound up spending the night in a motel in Tahoe City on Friday night because a series of delays had meant that we got to the trailhead at 8pm, which was just barely enough time to make it to camp by dark, if everything went perfectly. And since nothing had gone perfectly on our trip thus far (missed connections, traffic, etc.), we opted for the safe route. This is one of those times where you know what you would've done before you had kids and you remind yourself, well, now you have a kid. So I was a little disappointed Friday night, but it truly turned out for the best, given how Saturday night in a tent went. We haven't slept with Jack since he was about three months old, and even then he had his own little space in the co-sleeper attached to the bed. The decision to move him to his crib at that time was motivated less by any particular parenting philosophy and more by the fact that the child grunts and squirms a lot and is very hard to sleep with. He is also, I have now learned, a very light sleeper when it comes to rustling sleeping bags and shifting weight on sleeping pads. And he is furthermore, evidently, not too excited about being woken up every time mommy or daddy moved during the night. Let me tell you, mommy and daddy weren't exactly thrilled about it either. I don't think Jack has spent so much of a night crying, nay, howling, since the night we brought him home from the hospital and wondered what the hell we'd just done. I think we were wondering something similar by around 11pm when we'd already put Jack to sleep about a dozen different times and it was getting harder each time and we were on pins and needles, feeling like we couldn't make the slightest move, and realizing it was going to be a very, very long night. Is this what they meant by brave?

Okay, seriously, next time the child gets his own pad, his own sleeping bag, maybe even his own tent. Just kidding about the tent. I think. Aside from the night, though, the trip went beautifully. Jack was a dream in the car and on the trail, and seemed to enjoy peering over my shoulder from his little perch in the kelty pack my uncle Pete gave us (thanks Uncle Pete!). He loved playing in the tent with grandpa and sitting on grandma's lap, looking around in wonder at the tall pine trees around him, inspecting every boulder, log, and branch. He was delighted to spend the whole afternoon with his grandparents while his intrepid parents went on a hike to see if they could get up high enough to see all of the purported 5 Lakes they were camped at (answer: no). He also enjoyed playing in the sand for the first time when we stopped at Tahoe on the way out, at a nice white sandy beach. I had been too afraid to let him play in sand before now, figuring that his uncontrollable oral fixation would lead him to stuff whole handfuls of sand in his mouth. But I left him with his grandpa for a bit, and when I returned I found them playing there on the beach, Jack just feeling the sand grains run through his fingers, looking up at me and smiling at this new and different sensation. I think that's what grandparents are best at, showing you that your kid is ready for something you didn't expect them to be ready for.

So it was a hugely successful trip, in my opinion, one sleepless night a small price to pay for such fun. And we learned something, and now we have a good story to tell him when he's older, or to tease him about when he decides to thru-hike the PCT or something. The best part, I think, was after Danny had finally gotten Jack to sleep on his chest and it seemed like we were all going to be able to settle down into slumber for at least a little while, when we heard what sounded like something ripping a log apart and were suddenly wide awake. We briefly discussed whether it was a bear (or a buck sharpening it antlers in the middle of the night?) and Danny asked for his glasses (just so if it were necessary to leap into action, he could do so with good vision), while we both laid there in the dark, waiting to see what would happen, hoping it wouldn't come closer, not nearly as scared of the bear as we were of waking up that delicately sleeping child again. :)