Hello, and welcome to our blog, Little Wild Life!
In December of 2020, my partner, Sandra, and I came across the 1000 Hours Outside challenge: an internet movement, started by Ginny Yurich and her husband, encouraging parents to make outdoor time a priority for their children. The 1000-hour number is based on the terrifying statistic, that the average child in America spends an average of 1200 hours per year in front of a screen. I suspect that number holds true for Canadian children, and I further suspect that number has increased greatly since the COVID pandemic shifted schools to online learning. When we read about the challenge, we knew immediately that we wanted to give it a go.
CLICK HERE TO READ MOREABOUT 1000 HOURS OUTSIDE
Sandra, and I had already been trying to incorporate outdoor activity into our daily lives. Prior to the pandemic, we had been training with our then 1-year-old to embark on an 800-kilometer pilgrimage across Spain. We knew that we wanted a life of adventure for our daughter, but the pandemic took the wind out of our sails, and overloaded our family with the stress of quarantine, work in health-related fields, cancelled plans, social isolation, and health anxiety. When we began the 1000-Hours Outside challenge, we heard from a number of people in our lives who thought that the number was unattainable (“that’s nearly 3 hours a day“) but Sandra and I both quickly became excited about the challenge, reading a number of books about the importance of unrestricted free play outdoors for children. It gave our family something to push ourselves toward and work together on as a team.
A week into the challenge, bolstered by the good weather at the start of January, we felt great about our decision to take on this challenge. We weren’t averaging quite the number of hours we needed each day, but we were confident that we could make up the hours in the summer. We weren’t creating too much of a deficit. We were all happier, less stressed, and more connected, and we easily attributed our mental health boost to the purposeful time in the fresh air and sunlight. We went on nature walks, took photos of gorgeous winter snowscapes, and enjoyed the increased physical activity each day. Then, February hit, and we didn’t go outside for nearly a month. The year has been a rollercoaster of feeling empowered and proud of our time in nature, and feeling as though our friends and family were right and 1000 hours truly is an impossible goal (at least for us living in the Great White North). We are now just over halfway through September, we have passed the 800-hour mark in our challenge, and our goal is well within our reach, but it hasn’t been called a challenge for nothing. This goal has pushed us to get outside in weather we would normally choose to skip, it’s forced us to be creative in finding things to do outside in every season, and it’s inspired us all to learn and grow in ways we didn’t expect.
The purpose of this blog, is mainly for us to have a place to document our learning curve and safekeep our memories. We wanted to write down those experiences that we think in the moment will be memories to last a lifetime, but will otherwise inevitably fade over time (I’m terrible at keeping up with a paper and pen journal), and we wanted to share our successes and our missteps as we try new things and learn about outdoor adventuring. A bonus would be to connect with other likeminded families on the same adventure.
Thanks for joining us!
~ Jenn
A couple of books that we read at the start of the year that have motivated us throughout this challenge:
Balanced and Barefoot by Angela J. Hanscom
There’s No Such Thing As Bad Weather by Linda Akeson McGurk