Make Them The Reason... Not The Excuse. Sounds obvious right? Paige and I love the outdoors. Its what brought us together and brings a lot of joy to our lives. When we decided to bring our first child into our young family, we started asking ourselves "how will we include her in our active lifestyle?". "How do we share our passion for the outdoors?" 

It would be a lot easier to just put off most of our outdoor activities until our children are older. While it was and still is tempting to make them the excuse to not do those activities we realized the issue was in the mindset. Our children needed to be the reason to get outdoors. The reason to continue backpacking and adventuring. 

When the children become the reason, they become the focus for the activities. It becomes more about them having a great experience in the outdoors and not about how much harder it is to include them. The funny thing was that once we made the clear mindset shift, we realized that same mindset could be applied to just about every aspect of our lives.