We are going camping a few times with our three year old twins this summer. Can anyone recommend a good sleeping bag for sleeping? I personally don't like the mummy style but not sure what they're like for young children.
We have a higear moonlight 300 for our 8 year old we got a liner seperate and a cheap quechua square. we put him inside the liner then the moonlight then the moonlight into the quechua just to be sure. needless to say he usually sheds the quechua as we also have ehu and heater. but better to have too much than too little.
For our son when we first started camping - he was two, we used a normal sleeping bag and folded it in half and tucked it under him. It was a double bonus as stopped him from getting cold from the ground! He also had a fleece blanket over him.
Our 3 year old sleeps in an outwell junior cloud like this.
He is quite snug in it and the fact that it is narrower at the top seems to prevent him wriggling out of it during the night. Our 5 year old sleeps in an adult sized vango sleeping bag and is fine. The junior sleeping bags are good, but I think if I was in the same position again I would go for an adult bag from the off as per Angie's suggestion.
Our youngest sleeps in an outwell green+black dinosaur sleeping bag. Thats the boys version. They do a pink one for girls but cant remember the theme. Its great and always keeps him as snug as a bug in a rug-even during cooler camping months.
------------- 2015 Trips
January - Red Squirrel
February - Red Squirrel
March - Gimme Shelter
April - Elie
May - Noah's Ark
May - Riverside, Skipton
May - Blair Castle
June - Braithwaite Bridges
July - The Star
July - Witches Craig
July - Scone
August - Highburn House
September - Gimme Shelter
i have 2 outwell camperlux bags that i zip together for me and my daughter, i didnt want the expense of having to buy more bags the bigger she got, and they have worked really well, i have not had any problems with her slipping down the bag, and it allows her rooms to move into her usual sleeping position of directly across my chest!!!!
We bought our 5 year old daughter an Urban Escape mummy sleeping bag from Halfords for £12. Fits the bill perfectly and she loves it. (Especially as its pink, but they also do them in blue!)
We all have Coleman Hudson ,juniors for our boys who are 9 and 7 and we have the double... however my youngest moves around alot in the night and would end up all twisted, and I felt too kept in as Hubby would hog up all the room, so we all just use 13.5tog duvets now with thermal fleece underblankets and we are always nice and toasty - the downside is how bulky they are to transport...
The trouble with using adult bags for small kids is that there's a lot of dead air space for one little body to warm up. Same with square ended bags. Small kids are warmest in junior sized mummy bags with hood and shoulder baffles, with a camping pillow tucked into the hood rather than a big house pillow spreading the neck of the bag open. Think cocoon! As they get older and bigger adult bags are a better buy.
My kids are both pretty tall and outgrew their Vango Nitestar Junior bags at about age seven at which point I bought them both adult sized mummy Nitestars. DS was quite chunky so no problem with the width of the bag but DD is a long skinny thing, so I put a fleece liner in the bag too so as to block off some of the dead air space. She didn't like that as it all tangled up so we ended up with her using a small fleece cot bed blanket inside the bag.
So for 3 year olds I'd bite the bullet and get them two decent mummy bags, such as the Nitestar Juniors or the Outwell bags. They certainly won't feel constricted in them and they'll be warmer than in adult bags by a long way.