My sisters and I took our families on a camping trip to South Dakota over Memorial Weekend. We love spending time together, our husbands like each other, and the cousins are close, so we knew it would be fun. Add to that the fact that we’ve all been social distancing for a couple of months now, and we were very eager to get there and start hanging out.
We ended up having the most incredible time. The cousins played non-stop (and even recruited some joiners from the campground who weren’t lucky enough to be with a huge group of cousins), the tether ball on the playground was in use all day and half the night, the hiking hill behind the cabin was conquered right away, and the hill between our campsites was constantly traveled by one person or another.
There’s just something so wonderful about being together with no where to really be. We didn’t have a ball game to get to, a tee time to keep, an admission fee at an amusement park that needed “to get our money’s worth.” We just had each other and campground coffee and made up games (Clown? Infection?), music from a little Bose speaker, and time.
We went on a great family hike which I completely messed up so we never did make it to the abandoned mine we were going for. Some people went slow, some went fast. Some climbed huge boulders, a few kids crossed the river where it looked a little dangerous, while this worried mom looked on. A few kids even got the perfect Insta pic from the top of a great lookout point.
We cooked great meals, had campfires each night complete with music and ghost stories (which scared absolutely no one, but gave us lots of laughs), and were definitely not ready to leave when the too-short weekend was over.
As I was reflecting back on the weekend this week, as we often do when we had such a great time, I realized something. We live in a society where bigger is (supposedly) always better, we compare ourselves to our friends and neighbors, we think our kids need the best and most. But they don’t. We don’t. We just need connections. And time. And small moments that are the really big moments (like watching the kids help and talk each other over the rickety creek crossing or the big kids watching out for the little ones when it got dark but the game was too fun to quit, or my new step kids getting swallowed up by the big group of cousins like they’d been with them the whole time).
We think our kids need these big experiences, like if you don’t take them to Disney at least twice while they’re growing up, they’re deprived. Or there’s something wrong if they’ve never seen their favorite professional sports team in person. I’m not saying there’s not a place for those things. I’ve taken my daughter to NYC to see Hamilton. And it was amazing, and we’ll never forget it, and I don’t regret it one bit.
I just think that there’s so much value in the relationships, the time together, the times when we slow down and just let kids be kids. Jen and I grew up with cousins as best friends and most of our favorite childhood memories are around just doing kid stuff with them. Camping, riding 4 wheeler, building forts, etc. Things like that don’t cost any money.
That was something that struck me about our South Dakota camping trip. It cost almost nothing. We “splurged” on cabins instead of tents due to Covid0-19, but even those were considerably less than hotel rooms on a “regular trip.” Hiking was free, playgrounds are free, kids running around a campground doesn’t cost a thing, we cooked our (extremely delicious) meals instead of spending big bucks to eat out.
I think if you asked the kids, they would say it was one of their favorite weekends ever. As we move beyond life in quarantine, I know we’re all thinking about the things we want to keep doing or the things we want to go back to. Quality family time has never been more abundant than it’s been in the last couple of months (for us, I know not everyone has this same experience). We have done almost nothing that costs money because those things just simply haven’t been available. We’ve had absolutely no “big” experiences in the traditional sense. I’m so glad to have the reinforced belief that kids don’t need them. They just need family. Each other. Space to play. Time.
