500 hours: starting with a bang (not).

Have you heard of the 1000 hours outside challenge? I have no idea where it came from or who came up with it or any of that important stuff (which I should probably get into another day). But I’ve been quite interested in for for probably about a year now. Ever since the first lockdown and I stopped taking for granted being able to explore new places and go on little adventures, even if they are close to home.

Basically, this challenge is where you and your kiddos (or whoever I guess. I know many pet dogs who would be partial to being involved) aim to spend 1000 hours outside over the course of one year. You don’t have to be doing anything in particular, there aren’t really any rules, so it is really all freedom to you. The aim (I think anyway, I probably should have done some proper research before I started writing this instead of just looking at pretty adventure photos) is to get outside because it’s simply bloody good for you. It’s good for your physical health, and most importantly it’s good for your mental health. Being outside can help pull you out of a magnitude of funks. 

So I’ve been following along with it online for a while now, and let’s just say that I’m very inspired. Not quite as inspired as I am by pantry organisation before and after posts, but pretty close. And in classic Kaitlyn fashion, I’ve been sitting in the fence for this whole time about whether to try it out for myself. 

I guess I’m afraid if failing; this fear is common in pretty much everything I do. But I guess it kind of dawned on me that I can’t really fail at this, because it’s highly unlikely that I’d decide to never go outside again. Not that this should be what encourages me to just give it a go, because obviously just trying is the most important thing as opposed to not failing, but nevertheless it’s given me the kick I need.

I follow a few Instagram accounts and am part of a few Facebook groups for this challenge, and a common vibe within this community seems to be Anerican/homesteading/raising chickens/camping. And I’m definitely none of those things. Mind you, we do have a few chickens where we’re renting, so maybe that counts. I definitely have zero desire to go camping with two small children though. Anyway, I feel like a bit of an outsider, but I’m hoping that we can do it in our own way. 

Which leads me to: 1000 hours sounds like a bloody long time. A big thumbs up to those who accomplish that, but yikes it sounds like quite a commitment. So I’ve halved it for our challenge, which equates to about 1.3 hours a day. For a year. 500 hours of sunshine and rain and wind and adventures and emotions, all outside. I’m excited!

We’re doing this for a few different reasons. Mostly, because I know that it will make my kiddos so, so happy and I see how good being outside is for them. And also, probably just as much, it will be so good for my mental health too. And I really, really need to keep that afloat during this season of constant sleep deprivation. Because that is relentless, and so if I have to be beneath the sun and the rain to feel alive within that, then so I shall be. I will literally outdoors my way through the exhaustion to reach the other side, whenever that may be.

And so we started today. Monday 12th July, 2021. Snack bang in the middle of winter here in New Zealand, but we’ve had some beautiful, crisp days despite the cold. 

A few days earlier, I had accidentally taken both kiddos on a 3.5km walk (we just kept going and I forgot that we’d have to walk all the way back), and my two year old loved it. She zoomed, bounced, splashed, and yelled the entire way. I was so proud of her little legs! And because of this wonderful adventure we had (I mean, we even saw a flounder swimming in the estuary which was exciting), I figured why not start off our 500 hours with a bang and do another epic walk?

Let’s just say that things did not go to plan. And of course they didn’t, because I had planned it. So instead of beginning by hitting the ground running, we flopped. Majorly. But I guess that doesn’t matter, right?

So to begin with, I took a few too many wrong turns and we ended up at a sewage treatment plant; rather than the lovely, picturesque riverside that Google had showed. As one does.

Then when we finally got to where we were meant to be, after much cursing the lack of signs on my part, we barely made it out of the carpark. 

It was a very weird experience, and thinking back it feels a bit eerie.

For a bit of context, our two year old is like a border collie when she’s outside. She runs, jumps, and hollers with nothing short of groundbreaking enthusiasm for being wild and free. The only tantrums she has when we are outdoors are when it comes time to leave. 

But on this walk today, she did not want to be there. At all. She refused to walk. She didn’t want to see the tractors or the dogs (normally two Very Important Things in her world). She kept asking to go back to the car and drive home. She only stopped crying when she hopped back into the car.

I’ve never seen her like that before and it definitely wasn’t usual toddler behaviour for her. It was really just very odd. 

So all that really makes sense in my head is that she got bad vibes from the place and she felt uncomfortable being there. I tried talking to her about it after we’d left, to see if I could get a sense of what she felt, but all she kept saying was that she didn’t want to do the walk and that she wanted to go home. Then I brought up walking somewhere else and she seemed back to her normal self and excited again.

So yeah, I don’t really know what went on there, but it feels important that we honoured those feelings and left. Maybe we’ll try again another time to see how it goes. And so we spent on hour on the trampoline this afternoon, reading library books and jumping, which was a grand old time. 

So this was our first 1.5 hours. Not quite how is planned, but we ended up having a lot of fun and it felt good to be outside. As always. I’m looking forward to rambling about the next 498.5 hours to come.