As new parents, you’re bound to make your share of mistakes.

When we decided to take our newborn baby on his first camping trip this  weekend, we felt like our odds for making a colossal mistake were fairly high.

After all, you never hear about new parents taking their babies camping – certainly not 16-day-old newborns.  Surely there was a reason for this, right?  What were we missing?

But when you write for a blog called “Married To Adventure” you almost feel obligated to take adventurous risks like these.  Perhaps we were feeling a little bit of cabin fever after Amanda’s long pregnancy and the last warm weekend of the summer was just too good to pass up.  And so, little Ian became the guinea pig for our first “how to do stuff with kids” blog.

Here’s what we learned.

There are only a handful of things newborns do: eat, sleep, poop and burp.  And lo and behold, they can do these things outdoors as well as indoors!  In fact, Ian seemed even more enchanted than usual by the high contrast environment (newborns like distinct bright and dark shapes).

He spent hours staring at the dark evergreens against the blue sky and the bright flickering fire.  His favorite experience was staring at the LED lantern hanging from the ceiling of our tent.

Camping on a riverbed was a great success.  At home we have a stuffed animal that makes ocean sounds to help Ian sleep.  And a river creates non-stop white noise that doesn’t require batteries.

The only downside to river camping in September was the cold.  While we were up and about, Ian was passed from person to person and bundled tightly, so he stayed baking hot, but after we went to bed, the river sucked the heat out of the valley and a cool damp dew settled over everything.

Ian was swaddled in several layers of fleece and blankets, but newborns are little Houdinis and he managed to get his arms free, which became shockingly cold.  He still slept about as well as he did at home, but Amanda was up half the night for fear his arms would get frostbite (OK not literally but they were pretty cold).  By early morning, we said to hell with the SIDS warnings and moved him between us to keep him warm, and from that point forward he slept like a log.

I will say that camping with a baby requires at least one extra bag full of stuff.  So backpacking with a baby probably isn’t realistic, but car camping is certainly a possibility.  We already travel with so much crap, what’s one extra bag?

We would highly recommend using an extra Thermarest to keep newborns insulated against ground cold and while we normally use cloth diapers, we decided to use disposables to ensure he didn’t soak his clothes in the night, and we could cut down on outfits.

Other advice: choose a location that you’re familiar with, and one that is fairly clear of other campers (your kid’s going to cry and keep others up at night), bring plenty of bundle material, and a camping chair will make nursing a lot more comfortable.