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This week is the RV Household Digital Summit—a web-based convention the place touring mother and father share their greatest suggestions and data on what it’s prefer to journey with kiddos. I’ll be dwell Wednesday, Might 12 at midday MT speaking in regards to the prices of RVing. You may signal as much as tune in without cost right here and ask questions! 🙂
Final April, when the nation was all however shut down and we had been quarantining in place in Alabama, Ellie took her first steps. We had been there for some time, so by the point we hit the highway once more, she was strolling like a professional.
And RV life instantly modified.
RVing with a Toddler ❤️
When Heath and I first began RVing, everybody requested if we might journey with our children.
And after we came upon we had been pregnant, we knew the reply was YES. We had been going to journey as a lot as potential with our children.
We’ve been touring with Ellie since she was 4 weeks previous and so a lot of our favourite journey reminiscences are watching her see the world. Like when Ellie burst into tears of jealousy watching Heath eat gelato and cannoli in Venice.
Or watching her leap within the waves on the Florida coast. Hike within the mountains within the Rocky Mountains. Chase birds, bunnies, deer, and each single canine at each single campground. Giggle with delight when a monkey ran proper at her face on the zoo. Climb the pink rocks in Moab.
These moments are the highlights of RVing with a toddler.
Heath and I beloved touring collectively. However—as tacky cliché guardian because it sounds—there’s nothing like watching your child journey. There may be an unexplainable greater degree of pleasure and achievement.
Heath & I don’t share a lot about what RV life is like for us on our weblog. While you’ve been RVing nearly day-after-day of your total marriage, it’s much less like “Take a look at all this cool stuff we are able to do” and extra “That is simply my on a regular basis life for the previous 2,000 days.”
I wished to share slightly of what RV life regarded like for us final 12 months with a toddler as a result of it was SO completely different than our years of travels earlier than Ellie might stroll.
Ellie was 7 months previous after we moved into the Winnebago full-time and a 12 months and a half after we purchased our home. She began to crawl, stand, stroll, run, climb, and leap in that RV. And we discovered so much about what journey with children can appear like. (And simply how EASY it was to journey with Ellie when she was a child!)
Most people I speak to who’re excited by hitting the highway have children or infants and are occupied with touring full-time, so I need to share a number of the greatest ups and downs of our 12 months of full-time journey. (In case you really need the down-low on RVing with children, take a look at the RV Household Digital Summit streaming dwell without cost this week!)
Let’s begin with the largest factor individuals warned us about earlier than we ever had children.
Staying Adventurous
In penning this weblog, I attempted to consider a time that Heath and I couldn’t do one thing due to Ellie.
I can solely consider one: white water rafting on the Arkansas River. We camped proper on the river and watched so many individuals paddle by day-after-day! However apparently 12 months is just too younger to white water raft so we couldn’t each go.
Apart from that, she’s come together with us in every single place.
One of many fears I hear from my adventurous couple mates is that they gained’t be capable of go on as many adventures with a child in tow. To some extent, that’s true. Ellie gained’t be rafting for an additional 12 months or two.
However for probably the most half, she fortunately carts together with us on each journey. Mountaineering, snowboarding, splashing in waterfalls—she’s down.
The largest distinction is that as Ellie has gotten older, we began planning adventures round nap occasions so Ellie might remember to get in no less than one good nap a day. (It’s MUCH tougher to get a toddler to nap on a hike than a child!)
Discovering Locations to Discover
There are some stuff you by no means count on to do in life that can occur when you could have a child. Like saying “Don’t eat that [insert rock, deer poop, flower, dirt, sand, grass, etc here]” a number of occasions a day.
However the greatest never-thought-I’d-do-that that stands out to me is studying Google critiques of public parks.
When Ellie and I wanted to get out of the RV so Heath might work, a playground was all the time the best, least expensive choice. Most campgrounds the place we keep don’t have playgrounds—particularly not playgrounds match for a one-year-old—so I might open up Google Maps and search playgrounds close to me.
This usually pulls up any park on the town, failing to filter by parks with playgrounds. Which is why I might find yourself spending 10 minutes photographs and studying critiques determining which park had a playground—or higher but, a toddler playground—and which of them had been simply soccer fields. (Google evaluation mothers are so detailed. The slide was too sizzling! A number of shade however no trash cans by the picnic tables!)
I’ve been to so many playgrounds all of them mix collectively and Ellie has beloved all of them. Each city has one and it’s the proper solution to kill a pair hours and get exterior—particularly when swimming pools, gyms, indoor playgrounds, and every thing else the place children can play collectively was closed for many of final 12 months.
And within the fall, we discovered it very easy to search out actions to do with the entire household. We spent many weekends at completely different fall festivals and Ellie was fascinated when she bought her face painted (pictured above). I feel/hope throughout non-pandemic occasions discovering extra festivals and occasions to discover with children year-round might be even simpler!
Making Mates
This previous summer time, we invited all of our shut touring mates to caravan and camp with us. And we bought to see so many individuals! Together with caravanning for a month with our mates Chris and Rachel and their son who’s about 6 months older than Ellie.
We didn’t see many different individuals RVing with a toddler and—possibly that is pandemic-specific—however individuals weren’t significantly excited by our one-year-olds taking part in collectively.
If we hadn’t been capable of camp subsequent to so many mates, RVing would have been so much tougher for Ellie. She is tremendous social—final week touring in Florida she would stroll as much as strangers, wave and say hello, after which introduce mommy and daddy. The lady loves everybody. (She additionally made mates by stealing the opposite children’ toys as a method of inviting herself to play with them 🤦♀️ She has not discovered boundaries however is no less than studying to share!)
I feel that is one thing that might be simpler as Ellie will get older, however as a toddler, making new mates or spending time with different households with younger children was tough. Particularly after seeing how a lot enjoyable Ellie had caravanning with our mates for a month, understanding she missed out on that interplay for a lot of the 12 months was onerous for me. Ellie and I spent nearly each minute collectively whereas touring and I KNOW she bought tired of me and would’ve most popular somebody her dimension to play with.
Boondocking
In 2020, we boondocked lower than any earlier 12 months of RV life! We spent a lot of the 12 months in Colorado, so we had been by no means missing for mountain views or riverfront campsites. However we wanted hookups.
This was primarily for temperature causes. Within the warmth of the day, it might simply get to 90+ levels within the RV with out the A/C runnning, even when it wasn’t really that sizzling exterior. Most boondocking websites we discovered had been in direct daylight, making it tougher to control the rig’s temperature within the afternoon solar.
However the factor in regards to the mountains is that the temperature all the time drops at night time. Generally plummets. So whereas it might get actually sizzling within the afternoons, we might get up to 40º temps inside our rig. Sure, we are able to and did run our furnace to remain heat in a single day when boondocking, however the fan in your furnace will zap your battery life quick!
This grew to become actually tough for Ellie sleeping. She would nap with the generator operating so we might activate the A/C after which put on fleece jammies smothered in blankets at night time. (And inevitably she would get up round 2 within the morning and climb in our mattress for physique warmth and snuggles.) A drained toddler is just not a contented toddler, so we sought out hookups for higher sleep.
The second purpose boondocking was tough was the quiet. Boondocking is so peacefully quiet.
And Ellie requires a sound machine to sleep. Not a lot for her sake, however in order that Heath and I weren’t pressured to additionally go to mattress or be silent at 7 PM. Usually we activate the fan or A/C within the bed room and she will be able to’t hear a factor. However and not using a sound machine (or a field fan sound app on our telephones after we didn’t have electrical hook ups), Ellie might hear us up and speaking or hanging out and wouldn’t be capable of go to sleep.
These points in all probability might’ve been fastened if we had an RV that was loaded with photo voltaic and a bigger battery financial institution so we might have regular energy always. That’s one thing we undoubtedly need on any future RV in order that we are able to preserve the newborn comfy regardless of the place we’re tenting.
This wasn’t a kind of ugh RVing with a toddler is so onerous form of issues, however simply one of many small methods we tailored our travels for a toddler. Ellie by no means slept nicely when boondocking so it was best simply to keep away from it for some time for everybody’s sanity. 😴
Engaged on the Highway
Heath and I run two companies on the highway. It’s the entire entrepreneur a part of RV Entrepreneur. And we love what we do. It’s all the time been Heath’s dream to run his personal enterprise. It’s all the time been my dream to put in writing.
However two working mother and father + touring full-time to new areas – any likelihood of childcare =
And after a 12 months of touring full-time and each attempting to run our companies, we got here to a conclusion:
It’s unattainable.
It’s unattainable for 2 mother and father to work on a enterprise full-time 40 hours every week AND have a toddler AND journey full-time.
We took it to our Fb group to see if anybody else was making an attempt this and the final consensus was:
- We don’t each work or don’t each work 40 hours
- One particular person watches the children whereas the opposite works
- We needed to “drastically change our work life”
Which is strictly how we ended up. I grew to become a work-during-naptime mother working 10 hours every week max and Ellie and I went on adventures throughout Heath’s many Zoom calls.
Heath felt responsible about lacking out on adventuring with me and Ellie. I fell method behind on initiatives, missed deadlines, and dropped engaged on my guide. We didn’t publish a podcast for six months. And all our mixed stress made us understand we wanted to determine an answer—ideally one which didn’t find yourself with me closing up our weblog and podcast and changing into a stay-at-RV mother.
This was an enormous impetus for purchasing a home and switching to part-time journey (the opposite purpose we purchased a home was Heath’s firm obtained funding from the state of Colorado with the stipulation that we transfer to rural Colorado ⛰ ).
After a little bit of looking, we discovered part-time baby care with a mother, booked a campsite for 2 months on the town, and took the RV on lengthy weekend adventures round completely different elements of Colorado.
Then we might all journey as a household. Journey went from being this tough factor that we couldn’t absolutely get pleasure from to “ahhh this is why we love RVing!” And it felt like we had been all RVing collectively, as a substitute of passing off Ellie so we might get our initiatives accomplished.
Half-time journey has been good for us with Ellie being nearly two now. She has mates she sees nearly day-after-day. Now we have constant childcare and have caught up on initiatives we needed to postpone final 12 months. And though now we have a sticks-and-bricks, we’ve explored throughout Colorado, gone snowboarding, visited Texas, hiked in Utah, and loved the seashores of Florida up to now six months with out having to sacrifice our skilled initiatives. I launched two programs I’ve been wanting to put in writing for literal years. Heath offered Campground Reserving after working towards that aim for 5 years.
We couldn’t have managed this stuff if we hadn’t been in a single place for a short time.
With Ellie the place she’s at now and with one enterprise rising and a brand new campground on the horizon(!), full-time journey isn’t proper for our household proper now. However part-time journey (which up to now has meant touring every week out of each month since we purchased our home) has given us all of the issues we wanted. Group. Time. Progress. House. Adventures. New locations to discover.
We do plan to full-time journey once more—I’ve some BIG journey plans for 2023. I simply need to persuade Heath. And Ellie. And see if I can get Heath’s mother and father to retire earlier than then as a result of they’d be useful to have round for childcare.
However with a child boy coming this fall, part-time journey is ideal for us for now. 💙