Camping- nightmare or good family memories

When I was growing up, my family used to camp ALL THE TIME.  Partly because it was cheaper than hotels, but mostly because my parents LOVE it.  They think it's a very wholesome family activity and truly as a child I loved it.  The campfire, being outside, hiking, sleeping in tents.  It was all fun.  Taylor and I took Ethan camping when he was a few years old and it wasn't a terrible experience, but it wasn't great either and life has gotten busy and we've just not even bothered to buy camping equipment.  But with a little encouragement from my parents (and knowing they were going along to help) we bought all our gear and went camping.

We set up camp before hiking Little Crazy Horse Canyon so we could get a nice shady spot.  

And while we were picking, the boys took advantage of the automatic sprinklers.

Sorry campground people- your sprinklers may be slightly off, my boys were a little too excited to be able to squirt each other with high powered water.

After our hike we came back and the boys instantly made friends with the other kids in camp while my mom and I made dinner.  A soccer ball is a great invitation to be someone's friend.

Isla explored the campground in her current mode of transportation (crawling) with one slight modification- her bum in the air.  Apparently feet and hands in the grass and mud was enough.  She wouldn't let her knees touch the ground.  So funny since she's never crawled like this before.

I considered myself brave for just attempting camping with these littles so I was a little lazy with the cooking and we just roasted hotdogs and had fruit and chips.  Miles was feeling left out of the soccer game (since he's too small for big boys to really want on their team) so he and I played card games.

Isla put up with being trapped in the pack and play but wasn't too happy about it.

And here's our lovely campsite.  Camping gear has come so far.  It used to take so long and so many people to set up our tent.  These 2 in the background set up in less than 1 minute with 1 person.  They take down that easily too!

It was too hot and we forgot to buy wood so we ended up just roasting mallows over the grill.

Does it look like this one minds?

Apparently it was good enough to melt that mallow just right.

Isla is a mallow addict.  Seriously she ate at least 10 of them all by herself.  And then I had to wash out the entire pack and play with baby wipes and carry her down to the showers to get it all off her.

It was really nice to be outside with my parents and my kids.  Taylor finally got down to our camp around 10 and got to see the boys before we put them to sleep.  Isla passed out as soon as I laid her down.  The boys, even though they didn't get put down until after 10, kept laughing and giggling and finally went to sleep just before midnight when we all turned in ourselves.
It took me a while to find the right position on my air mattress and I'd just fallen asleep when Isla started turning in her sleep.  She didn't wake up, but she kept moving around trying to get comfortable.  Just as I'd fallen back to sleep, I heard Miles (from the other tent) shrieking at the top of his lungs.  Then Isaac and Ethan telling him to be quiet.  And Miles still shrieking.  Poor kid, he gets night terrors, especially when he's exhausted and the only way to get him to stop shrieking is to fully wake him up.  So I got out of our tent as quietly as I could, opened the boys tent, and dragged Miles and his sleeping bag out with me and back into our tent.  By this point he was wide awake but didn't want to have to come sleep in our tent.  He finally calmed down after a minute or two with Taylor, but of course Isla got woken up in all the commotion.  So I pulled her into bed with me while Miles went back to sleep with Taylor.  Isla was sweet and cuddled with me for a half hour, then would turn over and we'd find another comfortable position.  She did this 3 or 4 times before she finally decided she'd just rather crawl around the tent- at 2AM!!!  Thankfully Taylor stepped in and grabbed her and some blankets and went and slept in his SUV.  His trunk is basically flat so she just crawled around and played while he sat in the driver's seat and played his ipad... until 4 am when she finally passed out again.
Miles slept the rest of the night fine and I got another 3 hours before the sun and the birds and the other campers were up and so of course all my boys were up too.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the best part of this campsite- it's right next to train tracks.  No trains came by during the day or evening while we were there, but 12:30 sharp, there was a train, which apparently needed to lay on it's horn more than 4 times just to make sure we knew it was coming through.  In case we couldn't hear the actual train!  And trains came through all night- about every 1/2 hour to hour.  And they all apparently enjoyed blowing their horns... in the middle of the night.
So needless to say it was a long night.  And I'm not sure when we'll be camping again.  Maybe I'll take the whole family up a closer canyon and then let Taylor stay with Ethan and Isaac (who can sleep through the night) and I'll take home the littles who are much better off in their own beds, behind closed doors with white noise machines on.
I think it breaks my mom's heart that we didn't love the experience.  It was fun and we have the equipment so we'll definitely be camping more in the future, but maybe we'll wait until our kids can all sleep on their own.  And maybe I'll do better research and make sure our campsite isn't next to a train track.