Soren's First Campout

Every year, the LDS church holds a “Father and Sons Campout.” Although I am not the most avid outdoors man, I thought it would be fun to go with Soren. Even though he is young, he loves to be outside, with other kids and trying new things. He did better than I could ever imagined he could have.

Thanks to my 4-10 work schedule, I was able to get a good jump on the weekend. We went out to lunch on Friday with Ashley, then I finished packing and Soren and I left around 2:00 pm. The campout this year was on the Mogollon Rim (about 20 north of Pine, Arizona if you want a map). The elevation on the rim is 7,500 ft and temperatures are about 20- 30 degrees cooler than they are in Phoenix. It is about 3 hours away. I was worried about the long drive with Soren. Sometimes he gets frustrated on long drives and demands “get out now!” He did very well, slept for ½ of it and just watched the scenery the other half.

We arrived at our campground around 5:00 pm and set up our tent. There were only 3 other families up at this time. The weather was perfect and I felt strange being in a dense evergreen forest after leaving the Sonoran Desert of Phoenix. Soren and I spent about 2 hours tromping through the forest. We were overturning rocks and decaying logs looking for any number of critters. I was hoping to find a snake or lizard (I did find one lizard, but he went under a bigger rock before I could catch him). Soren was pretty interested in the array of beetles, grubs, worms, caterpillars, ant, termites, and crickets that we found. He was excited at every rock we approached to turn it over and see what came crawling out. About 1.5 hours into it, some of the other older kids (9-10 years old) caught up to us. Soren really felt like he was part of the group. It was funny to watch him interact with the older kids. They really treated him well and got a kick out of his excitement for the bug finding.

We returned to camp to cook our dinner. We just made a simple hobo dinner. Soren ate all his potatoes and carrots. He spent most of the time scrounging Cheetos and Doritos from the other campers. They had a fireside meeting after dinner. I had to laugh as there were about 5 fathers with kids Soren’s age. Their kids were all sitting on their fathers laps or snuggling to get warm. Not Soren. He was running around the fire, throwing pine cones in, urging the other kids to follow him, and getting high on marshmallows (I swear he ate like 15. Every time I turned around he had two more in his hands).

He had his only miniature meltdown after dinner. He was tired from the day and kept demanding “go home right now.” Luckily, Ashley packed Soren’s portable DVD player with some of his favorite DVDs. Although electronic items on a campout are technically cheating, I got him ready for bed, put him in his sleeping bag and turned it on. It took awhile, but around 11:00 pm he finally fell asleep.

It got cold overnight – I would estimate in the mid to low 40s. I was cold. I could hear some of Soren’s friends waking up and crying during the night. I fell asleep from 11:00 – 12:00, but then was up until about 5:00. Soren slept through until 6:30 when everyone got up. I could not believe that he made it all through the night in a strange situation without mom anywhere near as well as he did.

After breakfast, Soren played around with the fire, one of the dogs someone brought (Couscous) (Soren told me “I love Couscous”). He again stated that he wanted to go home, so we broke down the camp site and packed up. We left around 9:00 am and he slept the entire 3 hours back to Phoenix.

We really had a good time. It was all new to Soren, and he took it all in stride and he has a great attitude. He tripped, fell, got scrapes, and he never cried he did a wonderful job. I was worried that he was too young for camping, but he showed he was ready.

Sorry – I don’t know how to use the camera very well, so the pictures are not very high quality.