journey with the herbsts: first family camping trip!

wow, i am really getting behind here. sorry kids. we decided to take the whole family camping a couple of months ago. marin was still a question mark as to how she might do. but we took a chance. pretty much every campground that you could reserve a spot in was booked the entire summer so we just decided to start driving and see what opened up. we headed toward winter park and found a site on our second campground. the girls stayed in one tent and the boys in another. we also set up a "play" tent. the kids liked walking around, picking up sticks and such. norton built a great fire and rigged up the kids seats to where we could buckle them in. after the girls went to bed we made s'mores with townsend. and then all went to bed around 8pm. approximately 2 minutes after i had gotten into my sleeping bag marin woke up crying. she was in her pack and play and i think she was just confused because she kept looking around. she finally lay back down but she was up like this pretty much the entire night. i didn't have a watch so i was never sure of the time but i was a nervous wreck everytime she woke up because i was sure she was waking up everyone in the campground. it was one of the worst nights i can remember. finally i heard the zipper in the tent and norton was handing me a sippy cup with milk. for marin. he said it was 5:45am and that marin had actually slept for several hours. i took marin out and sat with her by the fire. trying to keep her quiet. 18 month olds don't understand what whispering is, you know. when some of the camping neighbors woke up i apologized for marin's crying. they said they hadn't heard a thing. i was very thankful but wish i had known that during the night when i was going crazy trying to get her to stop crying. anyway, we all survived. we even took a second camping trip a week ago.