How a group of random families met on the internet and decided to take their kids camping.
The Ordinary Superparents is a Facebook group created by the ever excitable Mel Findlater, a Canadian who is as full of bubbly joviality as she is with love for her family. She created the Ordinary Superparents group as a place for adventurous parents (and would be parents) to get together online to discuss the comedy and concerns with taking kids on adventures.
It was only a matter of time before the group all met up for a camp out and I was lucky enough to be invited to the first one.
Mel’s mate, Sarah, had volunteered her back garden in a small town outside Cambridge. It was no more than 20m wide but extended 200m in length. Walking to the end of the garden was like walking further and further into the wilderness. From a well-kept suburban lawn complete with obligatory trampoline. Beyond the high treeline of the willow and the silver birch. Passed a wild raspberry patch with succulent red berries hanging from the branches. Into the crunch of the bracken and woodland. Through the dark den and over the fallen logs. And still you couldn’t reach the back fence as the nettles and badgers had reclaimed the land for Mother Nature.
It was like stepping into Narnia.
The sprog loved it, running back and forth like a ginger-haired raccoon.
We selected a spot among the blueberry bushes and erected our 3 man tent, which considering this was the first time it would be just me and sprog, seemed absolutely huge for just the pair of us.
The parents gathered round the barbecue and the bonfire that had been erected by Sarah. ‘I wouldn’t be much a Canadian if I couldn’t light a fire,’ she said in a half joking, half very proud tone.
It was such an eclectic mix of parents. We had a single dad who had camped all over the world with the badges on his rucksack to prove it. We had a divorcee who wanted to show her girls how to live exciting, independent lives. We had a solo mum, a lady who had had a baby with no man on the scene, who was camping with her lad for the first time. We had nuclear families with 2.4 children.
It was brilliant that all these people could sit together with one massive thing in common. We all had been through the sleep depriving, tantrum enduring, tear dabbing, bum wiping job that was bringing up a child.
The kids ranged from 10 months old to 10 years old but they all got on like a house on fire, which was magical. The older girls took the younger ones under their wings like mothering hens, holding their hands as they walked through the forest, teaching them how to hold grass when feeding the local horses and picking them up and bringing them back to Mum or Dad when they stumbled over a log.
The sprog was in her element. ‘I’m going on an adventure with the big girls,’ she grinned as she toddled off in her oversized flashing wellies.
I even got a chance to throw my drone up and give a few of the older girls a quick tutorial, until we glanced up at the sky and saw the massive black cloud that was heading our way.
Quick as a flash everything was thrown into tents and we all did a mad dash back through the torrential rain to the house where the sprog and the other kids happily played with the toys that were scattered around the lounge.
‘Is it cheating that we’re inside?’ asked Tracey as she shuffled her little boy onto a different hip.
‘We can do what we like,’ smiled Mel. ‘We’re parents!’
‘And besides,’ Sarah interjected, ‘this is much more social than all sitting inside our own tents.’
And that’s pretty much the ethos of Ordinary Superparents. There was no chest beating ultra-endurance gorillas comparing the how severe their expeditions were. There was no judging eco-travellers with their pedestal high moral compass saving the rainforests one spider monkey at a time. There was no one dragging themselves through a desert or across an icecap starving themselves to death to raise money to solve world hunger.
It was just a few parents with their kids having a camp in someone’s back garden.
The shower passed and we were soon outside again enjoying sizzling sausages on the barbecue, and chicken wings grilled over the bonfire. The older kids disappeared off to play hide and seek into the woodland while the young babies enjoyed a boob or two to suckle on.
It was a wonderful evening of quiet chatter as we all shared our favourite adventure with our kids and the grievances that those other childless, normal people didn’t understand when transporting a screaming sprog to a far flung campsite. The kids cooked marshmallows over the fire before cramming themselves with their torches into one of the tents with Scarlet, the gorgeous Hungarian vizsla (That’s a dog by the way, not an Eastern European hooker) to chat and do what kids do best. There was no iPads or TV screens of smart phones. It was just kids being kids.
Eventually everyone made it back to their own tents and crashed for the night. It was the sprog’s first go in a sleeping bag and other than finding her at 2am having crawled out of the sleeping bag and curled into a tight little ball on her pillow, she seemed to enjoy it.
The morning was greeted by far too enthusiastic children at far too early an hour and the sizzling smell of bacon sarnies cooking.
Unfortunately, I had to scarper back home to the missus but the rest of the families stayed for another night. It was Canada day and it was celebrated in style with a Canadian stew cooked in a Dutch oven (something I still want to try) and a Canada themed treasure hunt. I even heard rumour of the Brits joining their cousins from across the lake in singing the National Anthem, Oh Canada.
It was also the Wild Night Out, the unofficial British National Day of Adventure which is run by Belinda Kirk at Explorers Connect. The Ordinary Superparents were ticking all the boxes last weekend.
And if you want to find out more about this band of inspirational and engaging parents then head over to their Facebook group and get the low down from Mel and the team.
Hopefully you’ll be able to join us on a camp out soon.