How We Prep For Camping As a Large Family (10 Kids!)

Today's video is a little off topic. We just came back from a wonderful camping trip with our family. It was just, it was such a great weekend and I wanted to share with you about it because it hasn't always been this way. We love camping with our family, but we have 10 kids and it can be a lot to pack for a big trip like this. If you're new here, hi, my name is Sherry. I'm married to Nelson, who's my high school sweetheart. We've been married for 25 years and we just finished up last year, our 15th year of homeschooling. We're starting our 16th year. I love coming on here and encouraging other moms in homeschooling and I often cover other topics like family life and that's what I wanna talk about today, how we prep for camping with our large family. Camping is such a wonderful getaway for families, especially when you have a lot of kids. We've found that the more children we had, it was harder to afford certain things. If we were to get a hotel room for the night, we would have to reserve three hotel rooms because with 10 kids, that's how many rooms you would need. So camping really is a great option for large families, not that we don't do other fun trips, we do other things other than camping, but camping is great. It gives your kids a close connection to nature. It gets you all outside, unplugged for a few days and I personally, I just love being in close proximity to my kids and that's something that camping really does. We're all out in nature, there's not a lot to do and my kids are all near me, so it seems like we're able to, if there are problems that come up, we're able to address them a little bit better because I'm not as distracted with all the work that we normally have around our house. So I love having them all so close to me and my husband. Camping is affordable and it just makes great memories for families. When I think back to some of the things that we've done together as a family, I think our best memories were made when we were camping. This past weekend, we found a gem of a campground in our area, we had no idea it was here and we honestly don't even wanna tell people because it was so great. We spent our time swimming, playing pickleball, we went out for ice cream, campfires, we had a movie night in the camper, we were just all snuggled in. I don't know how we all fit in there to watch a movie but we did and it was just such a great time. I've been trying to think what it was that made this trip so much better than some of the other camping trips that we've had and I think it was that my husband and I have gotten better at planning. I really do think it comes down to good prep work and this is something we've gotten better at, really just from learning from all the times we've had poor planning, that's kind of how we've gotten better but it just seemed like this past time, we really learned some things and it went much more smoothly. So I spent some time breaking it down, I wrote a whole blog post on how we prep for camping as a family of 12, just for your sakes but also for my own because I wanna go back and look at it the next time so I can look through the checklist. I have on there a free camping essentials checklist for large families that you can download and print off. This is something that has been very helpful to us is to have something in writing that we can go through and just check off and when we first started camping and packing for our family, we didn't have that and that's something that we did learn over time was just to write it down. Every time that we forgot things, we would write it down and so that was the last time we forgot it because we had it in that checklist and we knew to make sure that it was there. So I'll leave a link below for that camping checklist if you'd like to get it. Camping has its pros and cons. Of course, we love the campfire chats and s'mores, storytelling. I love being in close proximity to the kids. It's an affordable way to have old-fashioned fun. It's an unplugged reprieve. It refreshes your minds and it just forces us to play more games together, to talk more. So there are so many perks to camping but of course, the hardest part, hands down, is the packing. And this is even harder if you're packing for so many people. Now, I told you about a time we went camping recently that was stressful because the packing took so much work and by the time we got on the road, everyone was irritable and I was really wondering if it was even worth it. And after that trip, I really thought, I don't want it to be like this. How can we do this better? So I wanna share with you just two things that we have learned that don't work for us and that's kinda helped us to figure out what does work. The first one is we realized that as long as we have babies, tent camping is not for us. When our kids were little, I think we had just two kids at the time and we went tent camping and it was a small tent and I thought, you know, it's not gonna be a big deal if I don't bring the pack and play. We had a nine-month-old son. He can just lay in bed beside me and he, what I didn't know at the time, is that he is such a restless sleeper. I got hardly any sleep for several nights in a row and it was miserable. So it is possible to camp with a large family but we found that having babies and tenting is just not for us. We have an RV that we camp with and the thing that I love about it, first of all, is the AC and secondly, we're able to put a fan on the baby. They can still have their nap time. It can still be quiet for them and then the rest of us can do things during that time. It just makes it a little bit easier. So we've realized that tent camping with a baby is just not for us. It's possible, I would say, if we tried it again, I would definitely take a noisemaker or a fan that would help things feel more enclosed so the baby would take good naps. Definitely, I would have a pack and play so that we could put the child in the pack and play and just get a good night of sleep. Another mistake that we made was to do a whole bunch of canning and preserving the days leading up to camping. Now, if you've done any type of food preservation, you know that it's a lot of work. It leaves you exhausted and your house is a complete wreck and that's what happened to us. We got all the canning done but our kitchen was a mess which wasn't a huge deal except that I could not think clearly. It was just, it was the brain clutter. I could not think clearly to remember everything that we needed and to be able to make those mental notes and there were so many things we forgot that year. It was just, and it was basically because our house was a mess because we had been doing this huge project and I was okay with leaving the house that way. I mean, I don't like to. I love to have a clean house when we leave but I'm not super strict about it. I was okay with that but I just couldn't think clearly with the house being like that. So if you have an uncluttered home, you may not be able to think through what you need in a way that you're not gonna forget some important things. One thing that we did really well this camping trip was that we had very little planned the week before and we were keeping up with our regular chores throughout the week so that by the time it was the day before and we were getting ready to pack, our house was pretty clean. The laundry, we weren't behind on it, was pretty much caught up and it was just a great place to start from. So if you have a packed schedule, whether it's from canning or food preserving or anything like that, maybe something completely different, it's going to, that's where you're gonna start out from. You're gonna start out from that spot whereas if you have a lighter schedule the week leading up to it, then it's going to help you be able to start from a better place. I found that for us, the day before we go camping is a really important day. On this day, I try to make sure all the last bit of laundry is washed and specifically, now I usually run a load or two a day. That's just how we keep up with our size of a family. Our older kids do their own laundry. I only do laundry for the kids that are about 10 and under. But usually on the day before, I'll gather a basket of laundry and specifically I go up to the child's room who's usually about six and I go in my four year old's room because they often put their dirty clothes back in their drawer. And I've had this happen a couple times where I'll do all the laundry and then I go to pack their clothes and realize they have a drawer full of half dirty clothes. So I always go and check and make sure they don't have anything dirty in their drawers, add that to my laundry and that helps. On the day before, I like to pack all of the kids' clothes so that when we get to packing the day of, all I have to think about is food. The food prep is so much in a large family. So if we have all the clothing taken care of, that's just one less thing I have to worry about. Another thing that we've done from time to time is have the kids sleep overnight in the clothes that they're gonna wear the next day. Our kids that are ages eight and up pack for themselves and the way I do this, I get out a whiteboard and I just number it however number of items that they need to remember and I'll just write down everything. So sweatshirt, one sweatshirt, one pair of pants, three outfits, a toothbrush, a pillow, a sleeping bag, whatever they need to remember and have packed for themselves, I write it down. And the kids eight and up, they do pretty well on their own. I might have to check my eight year old and my 10 year old. And then sometimes my six year old will want to pack and what I do is I just, I let them because they want to but then I come back and check and usually I have to add a couple things or take a few things out. Writing a checklist for them just simplifies it, it delegates the work to them and then all I have to do is check. Another thing that I'll do the day before is to make some food ahead. Now I have a list, I'm gonna share with you the list of the meal plans that we use for camping and if I have foods on there that I want to make ahead, I'll do that on this day. So this past camping trip, I wanted to have oatmeal for breakfast one morning so we made ahead some oatmeal, put it in a Ziploc bag and that's easy to put in your cooler, it doesn't take a lot of space and it's easy to get up and heat up when you're ready for it. Another meal that I made ahead was sausage and rice. This is a simple meal, I've shared it on here a couple times. We just fry up some loose sausage, I add in cooked rice, black beans and then we put cheese on it. It feeds a lot of people and our kids really like it. So I made that one ahead. I planned to have potato salad with two meals so I just made a big batch of potato salad. Potato salad I put in a big Tupperware but some of those other meals, they're just easy to put in a Ziploc bag and store. Another one I've made ahead sometimes is pancakes, it's nice to have pancakes already made. So it is nice to cook them while you're there too. So those are some foods that I make ahead. The number one packing tip that has helped my husband and myself more than anything else is to write everything down. And we started doing this, like I mentioned before, we've learned from our failures because we forgot things. So at first we started making a list of all the important things we wanted to remember and then that list was on our phone, it was ever growing, we kept adding to it. And then we would get to our campsite, realize we forgot a really important thing, I think we forgot like a large pan one time. So we had all this food and nothing to cook it in so we never made that mistake again. But we also made a list of all the things we forgot. So this is kind of where our checklist started. And if you forget something one time and you write it down, you are not going to forget it again. The biggest amount of prep work when camping with a large family is always the meals. We've noticed that the more children the Lord has given us, the more our lives revolve around food, whether or not we want it to. Feeding a large family is no small task. And especially when you're camping, it's just a little bit more of a challenge. Now we could make a lot of food ahead and we've done that sometimes, but what we've realized for our family is that we like to have some of those fresh meats that are grilled over a fire, like barbecue chicken or hamburgers and hot dogs, a skillet dish that you can just cook right over the fire. We like to have picnic foods like fresh fruit, watermelon, cantaloupe, things that are seasonal in the summer. So while we do make some things ahead of time, we really just prefer a lot of freshly made food. Our meal plan kind of reflects that. I'm just gonna go through and share with you some of the breakfast, lunches that are on our camping checklist. So some easy breakfast that we will do will be cereal, bagels and cream cheese, oatmeal, and like I mentioned, sometimes we'll make that ahead. Eggs and bacon, this is one, we always have eggs and bacon one day because we love cooking over the fire. There's just nothing like camping in the smell of bacon. Toast, we'll have toast, we'll, instead of taking a toaster, we'll just fry it on the griddle. And then sometimes we'll have yogurt and granola. For lunches, we'll do peanut butter and jelly. Hot dogs, sometimes we make quesadillas, cheese quesadillas, we'll do these on the electric griddle. If we have some leftover chicken, we'll add that into the quesadillas. Other times we've done lunch meat and cheese and we'll just put it in a tortilla wrap, wrap it up. We usually serve lunch, like I mentioned before, with fresh fruit and vegetables. For dinners, usually one night we have barbecue chicken and this past camping trip, we had potato salad with it and then some chips or I had had some leftover peas that I had cooked so I just put those in a Ziploc bag. We had plenty of those, I heated those up. We like to put the chicken in the Instapot if we're gonna be really busy that day. But if not, it is also nice to cook it over the fire. But if you need a quick meal, the Instapot is nice to bring along for that. Another meal we'll have for dinner is hamburgers and hot dogs. And then that's easy to have with a cold salad, whether it be coleslaw or a macaroni salad, potato salad. A third meal that's easy to do while camping is a taco night. This is something that could be made ahead and it's just easy to add in your favorite fixings. It's a simple meal. Everyone can pick something they like and kind of make it their own way. And then a last dish, I have a couple different one skillet dishes. So for example, this past time I made sausage links that I cut up and I added in green beans and corn and we just mixed this up. It's a one dish meal. It's really simple. It feeds everyone, everybody likes it and it's easy to make. We also have snacks that we take camping. For these, we would do snack bars, trail mix, fresh fruit. We always take popcorn because usually one night we'll spend in the camper watching a movie and we love making popcorn for the kids. It's a favorite pastime for our family. I have two food prep tips. The first one is that we freeze all of our meat beforehand so that when we take it, it's all frozen. It just helps us so that we don't have to use as much ice, keeps everything cold and we only buy one bag of ice for our cooler. A second tip is that I write down everything that I plan to make every meal and then I slowly go through the meal plan to make my grocery list. And so probably some of you already do this with regular meal planning, but that helps me to make sure that I don't forget anything on the grocery list. Once again, we have so many things on our checklist that I can't share completely in a video. It would take a long time, but these are items that we've built up over time that we've made a complete large family camping essentials checklist. If you want to look at these so you have a good place to start from when you're packing with your family, I have the link below to the blog post where you can get our free download. Check it out before you go camping next time and save yourself some work. I hope that some of you can learn from our mistakes and from some of the things we've learned over the years about how to better prepare for camping with a large family. If you have some tips that I haven't included in here or some different things that have helped you, please, would you leave a comment below and let me know. I love learning from other people. I love to keep the conversation going and I really think that some of you have things to share that would be so helpful. Thanks for listening. I'm on here every week, usually sharing about homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I also like to share family life. I'll see you next week.