Survival Camping with Childen

We're buried under about a foot of new snowfall. Beautiful stuff, that. So as I'm tidying up inside our toasty warm house, listening to the sounds of neighbors' snowplows, I came across a palm-sized survival pack I'd put on the dining room table a couple weeks ago. (FYI, we only eat at the DR table when company comes; other than those times, it's up for grabs.)

Seeing the survival pack made me smile. I'd made one for each of the four of us in our family for when we'd go camping. We'd often take all-day hikes through the Canadian wilderness (pre-cell phone days, not that there's a tower anywhere near there now, anyway). It was just a nice security knowing we each had essential things in case we got lost, like a tin cup for drinking or cooking, sealed and dry matches, bandaids, toilet paper, string for fishing, etc..

During one of our first camping times after making these, while my hubby and I set up the tent, we noticed our three- and six-year-old were missing. We were in a new campground, hilly, wooded, ravined. Naturally, as soon as we parents noticed our boys were not in sight, we dropped our tent poles and started jogging around the area calling for them. After a couple minutes we heard one of them from a ravine next to our site. My heart nearly stopped, imagining them dead or injured at the bottom. Nope. Not our survival savvy boys.

Our older son decided to use the survival kit to help our younger son up the ravine they'd climbed into. OS had one end of the three-foot-long string. YS had the other end. DH and I affirmed their good thinking, then went back to setting up our tent while our children played in the wilderness nearby.