Camping is the Ultimate Good Enough Holiday

Our regular contributor, Michelle Vandepol, writes about discovering just how family friendly camping be.  Michelle's book, Mother Mexico, is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  

Family friendly vacations abound - they are affordable and easy to plan, but they do not necessarily come in those glossy pamphlets that you are eyeing at the travel agent's. Even if you are planning a trip with star ratings, camping is a good filler for the travel opportunities between, giving you more time away each year. Often we need to leave home to completely unwind. If you have been unlikely to do any holidaying in the past, camping is an easy way to start. You can go basic and rough it for pocket change or indulge yourself a bit more and reserve a spot at a campground with multi-amenities. It all depends on your lifestyle, family needs, and budget.

If you are busy bemoaning that you are unlikely to be taking a kiddie friendly cruise or vacationing at a 5 star kid friendly resort, you might have forgotten that holidays exist to get you away from the usual work and home obligations. Yes, even the social obligations. You will be giving your kids a block of focused time on them while creating some memories and loading up the family photo album.

Here is my plug for the family stand-by: camping. Pack up the station wagon and throw in the dog for some retro fun. You do not have to be only one kind of relaxed parent to go camping. Go in a tent trailer or a camper if you want things to stay reasonably clean. Yes, you can rent them. Try a tent if you're up to it and have good air mattresses to sleep on.

If you do go the air mattress route and have young kids, get a large air mattress to sleep everyone together. It's the easiest. If you have an infant you don't want to co-sleep with, bring a pack and play. Don't skimp on the size of the tent. Do not feel pressured to come up with all the camping gear the first time around. Search around your group of friends for a family that are seasoned campers that your family will jive with. Not only will they have the equipment for you to share, they can teach you how to use the stuff you do buy.

Just like the variety of camping housing you can find, there are also a variety of venues in which to go to. You can travel to someone else's backyard (Friends of ours drive out from the city to camp on our rural acreage). Or you can go with roughing it - a provincial camp site or a BC Hydro one might do you. There are even free ones. Look them up online. Don't expect electrical hookups or running water.

Lack of hook-ups can serve double duty as intervention for the families that are wired in around the clock. Leave the portable DVD player at home. Let the kids play with sticks, and rocks, and sand toys. Older kids can go hiking, cut up firewood, and learn to play poker. A note for those with tweens and teens: going with a family who have a child the same age will make hanging out with the family a lot more alluring.

Camping is as much a chance for you to forcibly recharge as it is about connecting as a family. There are no closets to clean and no e-mail to answer. Parents: leave blackberries and cell phones at home too. Come to think of it, camp in a place that is out of service area - mountain areas work well. Everyone will have no choice but to de-wire. When going off the beaten path a bit, you will want to plan well. Make a list and do the camping shopping a week or so in advance. Don't make the night before a flurry of overspending and stress.

That said, once you're there, you're there. Go with plan B for the things you forget behind. (Sadly, I can tell you that if you are ever camping without blankets, towels work as well - I am a much better camping planner with a few trips under my belt)

For more venues, our family has also camped by fishermen at a river with good results. When in an out of the way spot, camping in a group means some measure of security and pooling resources. Friendships are forged that much stronger over weekends away and families bonding together make for some special memories even years later.

For all the times we've roughed it, we've also camped at a campground in the middle of a good sized city with a Starbucks and a Save-on Foods on the other side of the hedge and a private beach across the road. We brought along a couple of teenage babysitters and went to dinner one night. It wasn't roughing it, but we felt authentic all the same.

Another camping gem if you've never camped out in the desert, amid rattlesnakes and horseback trails is to head to Nk'mip in Osoyoos, BC. Get a water front site and you will be a walk away from the wildlife center, winery, arcade, and showers. It's still called camping, but it's just a flip flopped foot away from a motel.

Don't forget what camping's all about — recharging. Family friendly travel means not a terribly long trip to get where you're going. Somewhere close to home is good for a start for kids not used to long car rides. And does anyone want to stop and fill-up for gas anymore?

It is possible to do a family getaway with young children, come in under budget, and come home a bit more relaxed if you go with realistic expectations. Things may not be perfect at any given moment on holiday. The fact is that it is unpredictable when you lay it side by side with staying at home with your usual home and its structure, but that is what makes for adventure.

Camping is the ultimate good enough holiday. Don't be one of those people who aim for something huge and impressive or don't do anything at all. Put a bit of effort into it, lower your nitpicky standards if you have them, and have fun. The truth is that there will be an element of the holiday that will be a bit of work, but if your luck holds out you might have extra help with the kids so it could feel like a break.  

Make sure you take pictures. You can recapture the moments in the dead of winter and look forward to the next trip, convinced that it was a lot easier than it might have been and shouldn't we pack everything up and do it all again.?

One of the best side benefits to camping as opposed to going somewhere that begs you to sightsee is that a lot of doing nothing time means hugs and kisses and long talks go uninterrupted. Think ahead and pack story books you can read over and over to the child who never tires of again and again. You will be thankful for the moments you are not chasing him back to your campsite. Bring an all terrain stroller so you can walk your way to relaxation; get in the exercise you never seem to have time for,;and more likely than not, stroll your toddler to sleep.

For older kids, card games and travel versions of stand-bys like Guess Who are popular. Bring a Ziploc bag so no pieces get lost on the first day out. For yourself, now is the time to grab your book club's selection of the month, a stack of magazines, and a journal. Planning and seeing things clearly happen with a bit of time away and you want to be ready for the possibility.

Patience is a virtue that might be tested on any family holiday. Taking one means trying it out. If it's tested, work on it and don't be hard on yourself. Look for the bright side of the situation. If it rains, cuddle up, read, and play indoor games. When it's sunny, seize the day and get active. If your trip companion friends are night owls, drink coffee and stay up. If they're tucking in early every night, think of it as an opportunity to catch a few more winks. Being flexible allows for a much more relaxed trip in the end. A low key affordable trip is a good alternative to staying home to perfect the lawn for yet another weekend or spending a paycheque or two on Disneyland.

Dad Spotlight - Bruce Grierson

We are so pleased to feature our first Dad Spotlight with Bruce Grierson author of U-Turn: What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living The Wrong Life?

Bruce Grierson is a four-time Canadian National Magazine Award-winning feature writer whose work has appeard in The New York Time Magazine, Popular Science, The Walrus, The Guardian, Marie Claire, Adbusters, The Utne Reader and many other magazines. You can discover more about Bruce Grierson at www.u-turns.org.

1) Please provide an overview and discuss the motivation for writing your latest book — U-Turn - What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?

The book was born out of a sort of combination of circumstance and a little eureka moment. Because Jen was pregnant with our first daughter, it seemed like the time to work on a book instead of the succession of freelance magazine stories that pay my part of the bills but require too much travel: that was the calculated part. I had actually started working on a different book, a biography of my grandfather, but then I came across something he'd written in a diary that connected some dots, and kind of resonated with some other themes I had been writing and thinking about for years. So poor Bob got shunted onto the siding and I worked up a proposal for U-Turn.
And, frankly, U-Turn won out over Bob partly because it was more topical and my agent thought it would be easier to sell. That's something I never really worried about as a single guy, but I have to now. I go at greater length into this question of the idea for the book on the website, www.u-turns.org. (Click, if you're interested, on "an autobiographical note.")

2) Provide an overview of your schedule as a writer and how many hours you work in a week.

3) Provide an overview of your home life, how many children you have, childcare arrangement, your wife's career and how you share the responsibilities at home.

Answer to 2 & 3:

Right now we have childcare three days a week, and I have Madeline one weekday and Jen has her the other. (Jen's a college English professor.) So we each get four work days a week if we're lucky. (Realistically, given errands and housework and sick days, it's probably closer to three.) I try to get up really early and get some work or exercise before people are up, and I conk out pretty early at night - I'm basically a really dull date. I rent a cheap office downtown to work it. It feels, to both Jen and I, like we have about half the amount of time we used to, and twice as much work to get done in that time. We rent a little house on the East Side of Vancouver. Our lives are pretty circumscribed right now. We each bear half the total load. But it's also true that without Jen's support - her steady income, her credit rating, her patience through the times I'm just not producing anything tangible - U-Turn wouldn't exist. I'd have had to do more lucrative contract writing, or teaching, or something, to bring in more dough. So in that respect I feel incredibly lucky.
Another baby is due in August; after that Jen'll be on mat leave for awhile. We're sort of girding for that stretch that follows. I'm looking forward to the baby; I am not looking forward to another round of sleep deprivation.

4) Have you found that being a father has impacted your career.  If so, in what ways?

Becoming parents probably saved both Jen and me from workaholism. Madeline is amazingly great, and she has enlarged our hearts about five sizes, and made us think about the right things.
But at the same time, you still have to do your job. And it's really hard to do it well without putting the hours in. Being a Dad has probably made me a better person, but a worse writer.
Here's an example: I'm working on a story at the moment about the neuroscience of compassion. This last week I talked to a guy who's sort of plying the seam between cognitive neuroscience and philosophy - at the very highest level — and I thought, before making that call, You know, I owe it to this guy really to have done my homework. This is pretty technical stuff and it's really easy to get things wrong (or at the very least oversimplify them). And I'm a doggedly slow worker, and not a particularly quick study. So everything in me wanted to prepare, prepare, prepare, to check and re-check. And that's how I spent the early years of my career: neurotically researching and checking stuff, and working every sentence until it felt done. But time can no longer be slow-burned that way. Time spent researching things into the ground is time that's stolen from somewhere else - your family.
This is one or the reasons people feel so verklempt in this stage of life. You want to be good at the work, and at the parenting, and in the marriage, and still have some time and energy to sink into the broader community, and you can't. You can't. The sheet's too small for the bed: the corners don't all fit at the same time. So do you fail everybody a little bit, or do you do right by a few people and fail everyone else completely?
While researching U-Turn, I came across a report by a Chicago psychologist of a client he was seeing named Ted. Ted was in a terrible state. He was a conscientious guy stuck in a midlife crisis. Ted was struggling with these same issues - whether to dig deeply in one spot or to be more widely … available. "Ted has reached a point where he is ambivalent about both of the two central tenets of his personal ideology, that life should be balanced, and that people should make commitments. Ted is still searching for a way to reconcile the conflict between these two central beliefs."
I read that and thought, Who isn't? Really: who isn't? Ted had articulated what maybe the practical dilemma of our generation, right now. We value two chief paradigms, and they are contradictory. The paradox is impossible to reconcile. Commitment or balance? Most of us have chosen to live between the two, satisfying neither and as a consequence perpetually unsatisfied. Neither balanced nor committed. Is there a creative solution in here somewhere that I'm missing?

5) Can you offer any advice for achieving a balance between your family life and your career.

Clearly, I have no answer to this. The most obvious answer - scale down your ambitions in all areas - doesn't seem very satisfying. Maybe, eventually, people just learn to live with the fact that everything coming out of the kitchen is a little bit undercooked. It's like how those east Indian fakirs learn to negotiate their relationship with pain: they learn how not to mind. I kind of hold on to the idea that if we can just hang in there until the kids are in school, it'll be easier. Try to keep going a day at a time, stay above ground, keep everyone alive. Try to hold on. And try to keep some sense of perspective. Because really, these things we complain about, these impossible choices, 90 percent of the world would see the whole thing as just so much juggling of blessings. And that's exactly what it is.

Family Friendly Travel for Vancouver, Canada

Shana Cherry is Co-Founder of WEE Travel Inc. a company founded by two sisters, Lesley Cherry (based in Toronto) and Shana Cherry (based in Vancouver), Their company rents out the latest can't-live-without-it baby gear to Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto visitors. They select high quality, brand name gear likely identical to the stuff your kids have at home. And they deliver right to your door. They do the research, they do the shopping, and they do the lugging. Their prices are very reasonable, equipment is in brand-new condition, and is safety inspected and sanitized after use. A brilliant solution to an otherwise daunting task. Check them out at weetravel.ca.

Vancouver is a gorgeous city summer and winter (even when it rains!!!)  Here is a list of kid friendly and fun things to do while in our beautiful city.

Monday: First stop is definitely Granville Island and the Kids Only Market.  (You do this first as it's probably a place the kids will want to go back to so you can use it as a bribe if necessary!!!)  There are a host of things to do in the market- The Adventure Zone is a great climbing activity and Camelot Kids is a wonderful toy store.  They are very selective with their picks so you can select from top notch toys.  After an exhilarating couple of hours playing, walk over to the Granville Island Market for some great eats.  Lots of different foods to choose from for everyone in your family.  Lee's Doughnuts is a great treat, as is Terra Breads.  Fresh fish, meat and poultry are in abundant supply and always fresh.  There are too many great spots to name them all here.

Tuesday:  Stanley Park and the Vancouver Aquarium are a "must see".  You can watch the beluga and dolphin shows and my son's favorite is Tag the sea lion.  He is humongous and fun to watch, especially at feeding time when he is on "best" behaviour.  If you stand right up next to the glass you're sure to get wet!  There are hands-on activities downstairs and an array of beautiful fish.  Another favorite area is the tropical garden where the birds fly around freely.  At certain times of the year the butterflies have hatched and there are hundreds and hundreds flying about.  Sometimes they will land on your arm!

Wednesday:  Science World is unbelievable for every age.  Most of it is "hands-on". We can easily spend a whole day in there. Depending on age, you can also go to the CN Imax (top floor) and check out the movie.  It's on a gigantic screen and you almost feel like you're right in the movie.  For a lunch break the White Spot, right in Science World, is a nice treat.  The Triple-O burger is legendary!  Their gift shop has some pretty unique items as well.

Thursday:  You've been running around a lot so far and you're exhausted.  Try out Le Petit Spa-  Mummy and Me Spa Package.  They offer a Reflexology Treatment for Mum - 30 minutes, an express pedicure - 30 minutes and reflexology for baby - 10 minutes.  All for 80$.

Friday:  Ready for more animals?  The Aldergrove Zoo makes you feel like you are in another country! Lions, tigers, giraffes, and almost every animal you can think of.  They have these great bike/carriages that you can rent for a family of four.  The zoo is spread out over a very large area and there is a little train you can take around. Be prepared to do lots of walking- it's worth it.  The zoo is about an hour outside of Vancouver.

Saturday:  Perfect day for shopping!  Be sure to check out Robson street, 4^th ave, Commercial Drive and most certainly Main street (between 17^th and 25^th avenues).  There are lots of unique, funky little stores for everyone to enjoy.  South Granville also has a nice selection of stores and the Chapters on the corner of Broadway and Granville is a great place to unwind.  You can browse through books while sipping your coffee (Starbucks is inside if you are so inclined) while your little one plays at the train table upstairs.  It's especially nice on a rainy Saturday and they often have story time in the kids' section as well.  Call ahead to confirm times.

Sunday:  You have to hit at least one beach while you're visiting.  Kits beach is the perfect one for a number of reasons: great playground, wonderful people watching, gorgeous views, tasty food, and a really nice walk that can go on forever if you choose.  The Watermark Café is there and if you want something less "restauranty", there's take-out at the side of the restaurant.

If none of those ideas appeal to you then check out this website http://www.findfamilyfun.com/ for a complete list of what's happening in Vancouver, on a monthly basis.  And remember, no need to bring your baby equipment for this vacation because WEE Travel Inc. will provide it all for you and deliver it to your accommodation.  All equipment is like-new and safety checked and sanitized prior to every rental.  We also service Victoria, BC and Toronto.  Bon Voyage!!!

Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees

Article by:  Jennifer Kirby & Andrea Kirby

Teaching kids about money is one of the greatest life lessons you can impart as a parent. Financial smarts are often learned at the kitchen table, and there are many different ways you can start the education process.

Recently, we met Kari, a very cool mother with four amazing, well-adjusted daughters between the ages of four and nine. Our conversation turned toward how, with such a big family, Kari and her husband dealt with the "I want this, mommy" tug-of-war and also managed to keep things equal between their daughters. Kari explained that the kids were terrific with money and that the kids had even made their own donation to World Vision over Christmas.

The family's approach to the kids' money and allowance evolved from a book called Money Doesn't Grow on Trees - A Parent's Guide to Raising Financially Responsible Children. This book gives lots of great ideas about teaching your child the basics of money management.  For example, author, Neale S. Godfrey, recommends that money received should be divided in four jars:

Jar #1:  For charity (sharing)

Jar #2:  Quick cash (spending money)

Jar #3:  Medium-term savings

Jar #4:  Long term savings

The sharing jar is money to be given away to a charity of the child's choice. Kari's kids combined their sharing money and selected essential items for needy families from the World Vision catalogue. This has helped her children develop an appreciation for those families who are less fortunate. 

The spending jar provides each child pocket money for immediate, smaller purchases such as a trip to the corner store or a new toy. The savings jars represent mid- to long-term goals. Medium-term savings might be bigger purchases like a bike or an X-Box. Long-term savings might be for university savings. Taping a picture to the jar can also help kids visualize their savings goal.

Author, Neale S. Godfrey also encourages parents to give allowance on a "work for pay" basis by setting up a series of chores for children.  She cautions parents against paying kids for duties that are considered citizens of the household duties such as making their bed or setting the table every night.

There are many different ways to help kids develop an understanding of basic financial principles:

• Develop a budget and keep a record of what they have purchased in order to review where the money went
• Give kids their own grocery list and ask them to help comparison shop
• Hold a garage sale to give kids an opportunity to price and sell their used items
• Match kids' contributions to charity or larger savings items
• Teach kids about how interest works. You may even want to open a high interest savings account or an in-trust mutual fund account on their behalf.
• Teach kids about credit cards and how interest is charged if balances are not paid off at the end of the month
• Arrange a meeting for your kids with your financial advisor

So many people that we meet regret not learning about money earlier in life. Simple systems like Kari's jar system can help keep the peace and will equip kids with the basics of money management. 

Andrea Kirby, BA, MBA works with Kirby Financial Group in Calgary.  She can be reached at andrea@kirbyfinancialgroup.com.