Making Use of Downtime While Camping with the Family

Happy Mother’s Day to all the hard-working Moms in the world! You deserve a day off for sure.

In honor of the publication of my new memoir Determination: A Mother of Five Conquers College, I’d like to share a time at the beginning of my college journey, when I thought it was a good idea to bring my math textbook with us while camping with the family in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

You see, after explaining to the children that I would be starting college in the fall, I had registered for a short math refresher course taught in the summer. This class would begin the week after our family vacation ended.

So, I had this ridiculous idea that I could just study the math processes from the textbook while my husband and the kids went to the pool after a day of hiking in the mountains. I wouldn’t need to bother anybody. The answers were in the back of the book. Nobody would notice I was missing.

The very first day of our vacation, my husband and five children demonstrated how they missed me at the pool. They each ran back to camp every two seconds to check on me and see when I was coming down to the pool.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, I couldn’t understand how the problems worked, even with the answers in the back of the book. Just reading about the math processes in the textbook didn’t explain in enough detail. For me. Which was probably why I needed this math refresher course in the first place.

At the beginning of our vacation, whenever I couldn’t understand the math process, I’d ask my college-educated husband after the kids were asleep in their bunks. Bless his soul, he’d take my textbook to see if he could figure out the problem.

But.

By the end of our two-week camping trip, he didn’t care anymore. When I dared to ask him about another problem one night in our hot, sticky bunk in the camper, he closed my book.

“Vic,” he said. “This is our vacation. Why don’t you wait until you get to class first?” He stuffed my math book into an already full cupboard.

So I had to wait and wonder. All I could do was stare, dry-eyed, at the textbook until my week-long class at college. And pray I passed.

Have you ever tried to hide away on a family vacation to study, work, or read when your children are around? Yes, my children were young at this time. The twins were going into second grade. And the oldest, who is learning disabled, was going to start high school.

Please share any experiences you may have, trying to sneak in a little work on a family vacation, here at Camping with Five Kids. I’d love to hear I’m not the only crazy person who tries to do this.

Thanks for stopping by my little spot on the internet. I hope your 2025 family adventures are filled with laughter and fond memories.