Description
This article is from the Outdoor
Activities for Young Children FAQ, by Gloria Logan
glogan@atk.com with numerous contributions by others.
43 CANOEING: FOOD:
If the child you plan to take with you is not born yet, the most
important piece of advice I can give you is: breastfeed your baby. This
will save you the hassles of cleaning bottles, preparing formula,
carrying city water, warming bottles etc, with the bonus that nursing
gives children more comfort than bottles. In 1989 Aimee was almost
completely weaned when, at 8 months, she went with us into Killarney.
By the end of the five day stay she was once again almost completely
breastfed as time and again her mother chose to nurse her rather than
get out a bottle which might be refused and then couldn't be
refrigerated once prepared. In addition, both Beth (then 2 months) and
Aimee could be consoled by nursing but not by bottles. When we had to
cross the muddy smelly Freeland Lake in Killarney, they nursed and
screamed alternately the whole way.
If your child is at the jars-of-mush stage, as Aimee was in 1989, and
you have a home dehydrator, you can do what Kathy did: pour a jar onto
a Teflex sheet and make a leather. You can reconstitute this with a
little boiling water very quickly.
We take fresh fruit, English muffins, cheese, peanut butter, jam, and a
long keeping summer sausage for lunch, and all three kids wolf it down.
They make a good breakfast too, if oatmeal or pancakes are not your
usual. For dinner we make some sort of "pieces of meat in sauce"
(spaghetti, chili, stew, ...) on noodles or rice, using home-dehydrated
meat and vegetables. We took formula powder along for "milk" with
meals for the youngest two until they were over two years old. Drinking
boxes of juice are more nutritious than powdered drink, and have always
been greeted as a major treat. Crackers and cookes will likely shred
to crumbs, but we took Cheerios and rice cakes and they stayed intact.
Of course all these drinking boxes and fresh fruit and pounds and
pounds of cheese will fill your food pack to overflowing. The joy of
parenthood.
Remember there will be no highchair (sit the baby/toddler on your knee;
sitting on logs without falling backwards is tough), and that the
can-and-bottle bans in most parks specifically exempt baby food. And
two camping favourites, peanuts and hot dogs, should not be given to
children without back teeth because there is a choking hazard. Jerky
and dried fruit are not for the toothless, though even those with only
the front sharp ones are happy to gum a small piece of dried something.
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children, child, kid, Outdoor Activities, backpacking, ski, canoeing, biking, camping, trailer
