The car is stuffed to bursting point, I’ve spent all day running around gathering belongings and buying last minute essentials and stayed up late crossing things off my mammoth to do list.
It can only mean one thing… The Sheldons are going on summer vacation!
We’ve booked an ambitious holiday this year, firstly we’re going to camp bestival for 4 nights with no hook up electricity and then we’re moving our beautiful bell tent down to Cornwall for a further 5 nights in Redruth (where we will thankfully have leccy!).
The last few days have been fraught with worry as we made our final arrangements. We’ve booked into the accessible campsite at Bestival believing that while we would not have power in our tent we would have easy access to power socket and a fridge. At the last minute it was discovered that this is not the case.
All of a sudden I panicked! Where would I store my breastmilk? And if I couldn’t blend Thomas’s meals as we needed them then how would I feed him? I know the obvious answer is a cool box but a decent cool box which keeps it’s cool for 4 days costs money we don’t have right now. We just have a tiny plug in cool box that’s not really big enough to get enough ice in it to keep it cold.
And then the festival seasoned friends we were camping with dropped out this morning as their youngest had come out with chicken pox. Que more panic about how we’d fit out oversized tent onto the tiny pitch without having a friend’s pitch to borrow from.
All of a sudden the whole thing seemed completely beyond us and we started questioning whether we should go. There were all these things working against us, feeding my anxiety until it felt like it was just too hard. How would we keep my milk fresh? How would we feed Thomas? Would there be room for our tent? Would it rain all weekend? How will we cope with packing up our campsite on Monday only to move to a second camp site that same day? And what if we had to do it with a heavy wet tent?
Chris and I had several phone calls back and forth asking each other what we thought we should do. We even went so far as to start enquiring as to whether we might be able to get a refund. But finally I shook myself and said No!
We will not be cowed into submission. We will not hide at home because it’s difficult. We will not let ourselves or our children down because we are frightened. So I drove home and we started packing the car.
I blended and packaged some meals and stuck them in the freezer in the hope that they’ll last the weekend. I squashed as many clothes as I could into the tiny little bags I’d bought for camping and I gathered all the electronics and the kitchen ware and the food and the syringes and giving sets and medicines and nappies and muslins, and bedding and chairs and toiletries and shoes and a million other bits of paraphernalia we seem to need while camping and packed it into our ginormous new car.
So we’re ready for an adventure. It’s scary as hell but we’ll make it work and most of all we’re going to have an epic time!
Team Thomas 