Happy Anniversary Mountain Mom and Tots fans! January 2022 marks the TENTH year that MountainMomandTots.com has been in existence. Woohoo!
In January 2012, I spent my days and nights tending to the whims of newborn Little G and her almost three-year-old brother Big E. My little family had just moved to the mountains of Utah, near Sundance Mountain Resort, one month before. Two months before that I’d had a Cesarian section to bring my second baby into the world.
At that time, days of breastfeeding, diaper changes and Thomas the Train episodes on repeat felt never-ending. Brain cells died, either from boredom, housework drudgery or lack of sleep. Whatever the cause, I craved something intellectually stimulating that incorporated my love of my adorable babies and of outdoor adventure.
Psst…my kids are seriously the cutest. See my very first post with photos here and see for yourself!
Three months after Little G was born, MountainMomandTots.com came into being. This website began as a personal blog about outdoor adventures with my baby and toddler.
Looking Back at our Outdoor Family Adventures
Over the years I’ve hiked, biked, camped, and skied with Mountain Dad and our tots on hundreds of adventures. Whether we wore hiking packs, pulled bike trailers, slept in tents, the Ultimate Adventure Vehicle or in a camper, we explored outdoors as a family.
When Baby L joined the party in March of 2015, she snuggled right into the baby pack and the outdoor adventures continued. For better or worse, we dragged our little ones on outdoor adventures, large and small. I tried to implement outdoor activities as part of our daily family life whether that meant walking to the school bus, throwing rocks in a nearby stream or just reading together in the hammock.
Mother nature seemed to be my ally in those early days of motherhood. Small outdoor adventures sometimes grew into larger campouts, trips and activities.
Some of our favorite large outdoor family adventures of the last decade include:
- Our National Park-to-Park Highway tour – 7 weeks of full-time camping with three kids age 7 and under
- Learning to ski after age 30, teaching each of my kids to ski at stupidly early ages, and eventually becoming a PSIA Level 1 ski instructor with a Children’s Certificate.
- Being chosen as a Trailblazer for the HikeitBaby.com 10K Women Trail Project
- Living full-time in our RV while traveling throughout the United States
- Developing a love of mountain biking and helping my kids all learn to bike
- Hosting monthly outdoor adventures with hundreds of MountainMomandTots.com fans
Looking Ahead
Now ten years have passed. And you know what? My tots are not toddlers anymore. Big E becomes a teenager in early 2022. Little G has her first decade under her belt and Baby L now attends school full time. I’m no longer the mama of babies and toddlers.
Part of my heart hurts just thinking about how much my tots have grown. I know we’ll never get those years back, but I hope my kids will look back on their early years with the same fierce fondness I feel for those years.
All things change with time, and with this ten year anniversary of MountainMomandTots.com, I’ve felt a need to change the content of this website as well. I’m still committed to helping families explore outdoors, but that may look different in coming years. Mountain Mom will still be out skiing, camping, biking and hiking with kids in tow, but you may hear less about it here on the blog.
Upcoming changes with MountainMomandTots.com include:
- More focus on creating ski and video content including a video series to help YOU teach your child to ski
- Retiring the MountainMomandTots.com Summer Camp, Mountain Mom Monday Facebook Lives and Helping Families Explore Outdoors Facebook Group
- More personalized email engagement with all of you on my email list. This is my favorite part of blogging, so if you aren’t on my email list PLEASE sign up in the box below. You won’t regret it.
- Streamlining Mountain Mom and Tots Patreon Tiers so I don’t constantly feel like I’m letting people down when I don’t have the content ready that I’ve promised.
- Intermittant blog posts and social media posts. These seem to suck the joy out of outdoor adventures for me sometimes, so I’m only going to post something when I feel inspired, not according to an imposed schedule.
- Only promoting companies and products that align with my zero waste, eco-friendly paradigm.
I’m taking a big step back from Mountain Mom and Tots right now to evaluate what the next ten years of this website will look like. There are still many things I want to share that I believe will help families explore outdoors. What those things are and how they will be shared may look different, but I hope they will still help your family explore outdoors.
It’s been a great ten years.
See you in the outdoors,
~Mountain Mom
