Outside Baby offers a versatile and comfortable cooler backpack. It is the Cadillac of backpacks for parents with young children.  This bag is excellent to use for: diaper bag, dropping your child off at day care, day hikes, picnics at the park, ball games, or any other daily outings mom or dad may be going on with their child.

This bag has a cooler compartment for a lunch, separate wet/dry sections, adjustable straps, bottle holder, and an integrated removable changing pad.  I am so excited about this bag because it is the perfect companion for our afternoon hikes.  As the weather gets colder, I use the changing pad as a sitting mat for Cora who is already potty trained.   Either Erik or I feel comfortable wearing this backpack in town, because of its unisex design and non ‘diaper bag with lunch cooler attached’ look.

This is an extremely comfortable shoe - just putting it on makes me feel relaxed. It is fashionable in a way that I thought gave a nod to skateboard shoe style, but when I checked on Merrell's site they said that it also offered, "A lot of European sophistication." I wouldn’t wear these shoes hiking, but they are ideal for hanging out, wearing around town, or travel in urban environments.

Merrell walking shoe

With luggage weight and number restrictions it is always difficult to decide what to pack.  You want your child to be comfortable. You want to have your holiday outfits, but you also want to be able to go play outside, explore a nearby forest, or hike for an afternoon.  For Cora we are bringing only one pair of shoes, her Merrell Jungle Moc Junior's These cute shoes will work well with dresses, and can be easily slipped on and off in the airplane. She can even help put them on herself and they're great for outdoor play with non slip and non marking soles.

I just wanted to share our flying experience with Anna when she was four months old.  We flew home to PA to visit for my father's 70th birthday surprise.  Our flight to PA was so awful, my husband and I were scheming on how we could drive 33 hours back home, so that at least if our baby cried, we wouldn't have to share it with everyone around.  We didn't just experience crying, but that inconsolible crazy colic crying that eats at you soul for 4 hours.  After mustering all our courage, we had a dream flight back home and Anna slept the whole way.  What gives?  Here is what we could come up with: 

Fly early in the day.  It seemed Anna's tollerance of the airport and all the extra stimulation was much greater. 

Have something for baby to suck on, breast, bottle or paci during take off and landing.

Set up for a nap right before boarding the plane.  We did our change, feed and walk normal nap routine.

Try a dose of Tylenol if ok with your doctor, it seemed to help Anna relax a little, fall asleep and stay asleep despite take off and hurting ears.

Stay Calm yourself.  I worked hard to breathe deep and visualize a calm, peaceful, sleeping baby.  Somehow, I really think this helped.

I hope our experience will help someone who is traveling over the holidays have a smooth trip.

I found this website through Hyatt Hotels and gave it a try.  The service is called Babies Travel Lite and they will deliver all of the baby products you will need during your trip directly to your hotel. I used them a couple of weeks ago on our trip to Walt Disney World and it was great. We arrived at the hotel and our box with all of Michael's baby diapers, infant formula, organic baby food, and baby bath stuff was sitting on the bed. It was a great experience from start to finish and I think it should be the Tip Of The Week. I was able to order from hundreds of baby supplies online, told them where I was going and when I arrived and that was it. It was a little scary since we left the house without any baby supplies for our family vacation, but the service was perfect. The front desk knew about our box and told us it was waiting in our room. I have been telling everyone I know that has a baby about this service and how easy it was to travel with a baby and not have to shop for all of those baby products for your trip, pack them, take an extra suitcase, pay extra service fees for excess luggage and worry about the airline losing you luggage. I knew everything was OK with our order from Babies Travel Lite because they sent me a tracking number so I could track the box, then they sent another email that told me who was holding my box and where in the hotel so I would know in case it wasn't in my room when I checked in. Very cool service and my vote for Tip on the Week. I will be using them again when we go on our Thanksgiving family vacation to Hawaii.

I have tried many "all-in-one" diaper systems, including BumGenius and gDiaper and Fuzzi Bunz are my far and away favorite to use and clean. I did a test drive for Outdoor Baby to see how the Fuzzi Bunz would hold up to travel, and they performed wonderfully.

If you haven't seen a Fuzzi Bunz diaper it's basically a pouch (in cute colors) that you put an insert into. You can use the Fuzzi Bunz insert or you can stick a prefold in there. The outer part snaps in the front and they come in sizes to fit all bodies- even teeny tinies.

I currently use Fuzzi Bunz for my 5-month old and for my 2 and a half year-old as his nighttime/ naptime diaper. For everyday use, I wash my Fuzzi Bunz with two methods, and I alternate them. One is pre-wash cold with baking soda (or a first wash if your machine doesn't have a prewash cycle), and a second or regular wash hot (or warm) with a cold rinse and I put white vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser. This combo makes the diaper inserts clean and soft and takes away the acrid urine smells. It also helps with the Fuzzi Bunz to keep their soft fleecy feel on the part that touches your baby. Then I air-dry the outer part of the Fuzzi Bunz.

For travel, I found in my test-drive that Fuzzi Bunz can hold up to a lot of crap- literally. After a week of being packed in a plastic bag my fuzzi bunz outer liner and insert, when washed with the above method, came out like brand new. Granted, it was brand new when I started...older fuzzi bunz will hold the stains longer, but in the first 3 months of use I've found that the fuzzis really clean up to almost no stain.

With camping, I bring enough Fuzzi outer wraps and double the number of liners. When it's wet, airdry in the sun and replace the insert with a new one or a prefold. When dirty, pack out after rinsing or wash in a water-boil in the evening. Wet fuzzis surely add  weight to a backpacking trip, so plan to dry them out each day.

Your visiting this website and you are looking for tips on how to travel in the outdoors but you also know that either: a)  your outdoor adventures are as exotic as going to the park; b) your daughter follows  you on multi-day treks in  the thick of the Ganges, or; c) you do different outdoor activities but you are on this site because you are going on an airplane to visit family but you want to make sure that everyone knows your child is cute, fashionable, and adventurous.

For whatever reason you are reading this posting, the Lodge Pole Jumper (girls) or Lodge Pole overalls (boys) is the outfit for your child.  Made from 6 whale durable 100% corduroy are so soft and cuddly, you‘ll forget you are hugging your rugged two year old hiking partner.  Your daughter will be happy to be wearing a ‘dress’ and you will be happy it is a dress that is durable and protects her knees during her little hike.

They can be purchased from MountainSprouts.com for $42.  They are made in the USA and you will be supporting a Colorado company.

Heidi

Remember a winner will receive a fifty dollar gift certificate for Mountain Sprouts.  All you need to do is share a story, tip, trick, question on this website and one winner will be selected by October 31^st.

Leslie's boutique offers a variety of cloth diapers and accessories, but the product that caught my eye was there designer wet bags.  These bags look great and don't scream out dirty diaper or even parent with child in tow.

The bag that I tried out held ten dirty cloth diapers and had a handy little aromatic oil cloth to help with the smell.  When the bag was zipped it never leaked or any smell escaped.

For nine dollars ($9) these bags are a great bargain, since they can be used for a variety of different uses:  store dirty shoes in a suitcase, for wet cloth or for bathing suites after a long day at the beach or pool.  Leslie's boutique offers smaller versions of these bags for snacks or for a short outdoor excursion.

I want to emphasis that these bags are so great for a variety of different uses.  It will grow with the needs of your children.  This is a great bag for wet children clothes, swimsuits or dirty shoes.

To purchase one of these great wet bags visit: Leslie's boutique

Heidi

Friends of ours came to visit us from Thunder Bay, which is located on the north shore of Lake Superior in Canada.  The landscape were they come from is full of coniferous trees, enormous bodies of water (Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world) and literally hundreds of thousands of rivers and lakes.  There is so much water and greenery.

Somehow, it seemed the obvious choice but to bring them to Utah on their first visit of the Western United States.

We drove two hours south of Moab into the southeast corner of Utah with them and visited different archeological sites. In this part of the country there is very little water, if any, the earth is dry, the trees short, and the desert is sprinkled with sage, cactus, and rocks.  To get to some of these sites was quite easy.  A short hike from the car was all that was required to see ruins and to discover thousand-year old sites full of old pot chards and other little artifacts (which we put back exactly where we found them as archeological site etiquette demands). This proved to be a true delight for our ten year old visitor.

The other site that we visited required us to backpack in and to stay the night.  We found an amazing campsite on flat river rocks that overlooked an enormous canyon.  A cliff-skirting hike was required to get to the cliff-dwelling that we visited.  This was a scary but worthwhile adventure.  Although Cora (who is two years old) accompanied us on all these adventures she did not go on this part of the hike. She stayed behind and played in the dried up river beds, looking at frogs, tadpoles and snakes that were stuck in deep water pits that were filled by flash floods probably a few weeks earlier.  Since Zach is ten years old, he introduced Cora to exploring small crevices for live creatures.  It held Cora’s attention more than anything else ever did.

It is great to travel outdoors with another family. You get to learn how others interpret the natural world, what they do to get prepared for a trip and how they camp.  It was really a delight to share this terrain with them since they are very comfortable in the outdoors.  What was interesting was to see that most of their skills were very transferable to this new environment, but others were not. For example, they were suspicious of my concern that we did not have enough containers to carry the right amount of water.  I insisted that we stop and purchase a large dromedary to carry water.  This water became invaluable on the cliff dwelling section of the trip.    Having another child along during a trip makes it fun for your own child, even one who is comparatively much older. Coralie found it so exciting to see how Zach was a capable outdoors person and what he was interested in.  Everyone on a trip can really open their horizons when they are in the company of new people.

I really recommend visiting the area south of Moab.  It provides such an amazing landscape and has so many interesting historical sites to visit.  You would need to find yourself a book on the area to better find pictographs, petroglyphs and archeological sites.  If you are not a huge outdoor adventurer you can find drive-up sites near the town of Moab.

Heidi

As parents who are interested in sharing the wonders of the natural world with our children, I think it is important to support the health of our children and our planet as well.

Think Baby provides  affordable plastic baby bottles and trainer cups that are made from safe plastics.  If you are concerned with toxic chemicals leaching from plastic baby products think of getting one of these bottles or cups for your child.  They are Free of Bisphenol-A, Phthalates, and PVC.  Their peach colored handles are easy to grip and the spouts are extra soft.

Think of purchasing one of these cups today at this very customer friendly store.  They also have other products to offer you: www.thinkbabybottles.com

For your chance to win a Think Baby cup enter your story, tip, or question during the month of September. You may be our lucky winner.

Here are some November 4th, 2008  resources:

• Volunteer to register voters with Rock the Vote
• Participate in election campaigns:
• Click here for Change 
• Visit Green Party website Here
  

I enjoyed your article, Heidi, and wanted to share the system that we've settled on, as I think it works particularly well for traveling/hiking/backpacking. Most of the time, we use a system similar to gDiapers, but with an absorbent cloth pad inside of a diaper cover. It looks like this. When traveling, we wash the pee-soaked items by hand, and store the poopy ones for home or a laundromat. If we don't have the time (or good weather) for laundry, then we can replace the cloth pads with the compostable gDiaper pads. These can be disposed of in a pit toilet or buried or packed out. At a minimum, we hand wash the diaper covers, but we usually only go through about two of those per day, and they're easy to wash inside of a gallon ziploc bag. Oh, and we also use cloth wipes, though we sometimes buy disposable wipes after they run out, depending on how easy it is for us to do laundry on a particular trip.

To read the complete blog by Sommer Poquette please click here.

She will lead you through her thoughts on purchasing an RV.  For one week she explores the idea of greening RV'ing.