Camping While Pregnant: 35 Weeks

I believe that we have already established that I might be a glutton for punishment, but I was testing the boundaries yet again by camping at 35 weeks pregnant. Spoiler alert: I would not recommend camping at 35 weeks pregnant. Thankfully, we had plenty of friends to pick up the slack while I took naps in the hammock.

Although I would not recommend camping at this point in a pregnancy, I would have hated missing our annual 4th of July coast camping trip with our dear friends. Thankfully, this year we were a little closer to home, camping at Bullards Beach State Park near Bandon. If anything could help me feel less miserably pregnant, it would be the beach and the distraction of fun times with friends.

However.

The first night we were camping, by approximately 2 am our air mattress was completely and entirely deflated. It had been a slow, literally painful-to-my-pregnant body process. At first there was denial, my brain simply telling me that Brandon must have not adequately inflated the mattress. Soon it was too apparent that there must be a leak somewhere as hour by hour the top of the mattress moved incrementally toward the floor. Finally, I had to admit that the mattress was, in fact, no longer functioning as a mattress. Not being comfortable sleeping on the ground and unable to rouse my husband, who apparently was having no difficultly sleeping through the great air mattress debacle, I so very ungracefully made my way to my feet and stumbled out to the car, pillow in hand. I took a minute to marvel at the spectacular night sky, unpolluted by light at this time of the morning, before climbing into the car and making myself as comfortable as possible. Although a deflated air mattress did not disturb his sleep, the lack of my presence apparently did and Brandon joined me soon after for a slightly-better-than-sleeping-on-the-ground night/morning of sleep.

I made my best attempt to convince Brandon we needed to purchase a new air mattress, but instead he spent a signifiant portion of the day trying to fix it. Was he successful? Well, sort of. Although he fixed the primary leak, there was one smaller leak that had been missed. This night, the mattress deflated even more slowly, but by the middle of the night, it was clear it was not going to make it through the night. Brandon re-inflated it, unconcerned about the ruckus he was making in the quiet campground, and we more or less made it through the night. Emphasis on the less.

The next day Brandon spent even more time trying to fix it, despite my insistence that I wasn’t going to put up with another sleepless night.

The third night was the charm and we managed to make it through our final night of camping with a fully inflated air mattress. Generally, an air mattress is not the most comfortable of sleeping implements, but that third night? The only thing that woke my was my bladder, increasingly pressed upon by my ever expanding uterus with assistance from an active baby. Brandon slept in a blissful haze of success having conquered the leaking air mattress. And because we had not spent $60 on a new air mattress, after all.

Beyond the saga of the air mattress, we had a quite wonderful camping trip. We enjoyed all of the 4th of July festivities in Bandon, including a parade, cardboard boat races, and fireworks.

Brandon did coastal type things like go fishing while I did pregnant type things like take naps and enjoy a much needed pedicure.

And, as per usual for the 4th of July camping trip, we ate really, really well. There are definite benefits to being friends with professional chefs. Not ones to sit back and be outdone, our contributions were breakfast burritos and a crab boil.

Despite the air mattress fiasco and the resulting nights of terrible sleep, I had an excellent time and am so glad we made the effort to go. However, even I had to admit that my camping days were temporarily over. Good thing, too, because soon after that I was put on bedrest. But just because we were having a baby, didn’t mean our adventuring days were done. It meant that we were getting a fun new partner in exploration, one to whom everything would be novel and new. Really, the adventure was only beginning.