When we discovered our local public school wasn’t kidding about their state-mandated vaccination requirements, we saw no other choice but to pull our boys out, sell off our assets, and hit the road in a one-bedroom RV with plenty of room for our seven children.
Where others might have seen a life isolated from the rest of the world, existing on the fringes of society, we saw the chance to give our children an exciting, nurturing, and conveniently extremely monetizable upbringing. So we funneled $100k into an RV, a fancy vlogging camera, and twelve iPads to do the parenting part for us. Only the best for our darlings Figaro, Willoughby, Kayden-Jaymes, Jayden, Limestone, and twins Scooter and Spruce.
Our van has a bedroom with a queen-sized bed that’s only for Mom and Dad. But our kids have plenty of room in their bunk beds that double as storage and triple as their desks when they do “math.” Once, Willoughby told us that he likes to pretend he’s a vampire at night because it feels like sleeping in a coffin. We laughed nervously and hoped BetterHelp wouldn’t pull their sponsorship since we were already live on Instagram.
We turned our bathroom into mom’s editing studio, but our luxury outdoor hose has the world’s best water pressure if you put your thumb over the nozzle and pray to the deity of your choice. Since Mom edits videos twelve hours a day, we have to stop whenever one of our children needs to pee, which is all the time. We’re working on syncing their bladders with the moon cycle. Only once have we accidentally left one child—Limestone—behind at a rest stop. But don’t worry; we realized our error before we’d even gone a hundred miles.
I’ve become a bit of a laissez-faire parent, in the sense that I have to keep my hands on the wheel at all times, but van-schooling is going great. Exhibit A: Our twenty-six-month-old twins Scooter and Spruce are already fluent in British English, thanks to Professor Peppa Pig. They call her “Mom,” which is totally adorable.
Our kids have tons of friends. For instance, Kayden-Jaymes’s best friend is a seven-year-old boy named Cayden-Gaymes. He comes with us everywhere we go because he’s a figment of our brilliant son’s imagination. He projects the identity of his imaginary friend onto everyone he meets, usually truancy officers. Willoughby was quite taken with a possum uncharacteristically comfortable around humans at one of the campfires, so we decided it was time to get the children a proper pet appropriate for the van. Something small and manageable for our on-the-go lifestyle. So after a Twitter poll, we adopted a Great Dane. And the possum.
What our kitchen lacks in utensils and running water, it makes up for in pickled radishes. For breakfast, we have Erewhon granola and gas station bananas. For dinner, we have locally sourced koi fish from private ponds. We don’t believe in lunch.
Haters say it’s unhealthy for kids to spend all their time in a van and never set foot in a traditional school or pediatrician’s office. Our children have road-smarts and are vaccinated by nature. Meaning, they’ve all had diphtheria twice. Limestone is also the first child to have survived rabies. Unfortunately, we had to put the possum down.
Our goal for our children is to recreate what life was like on the Oregon Trail, but with organic granola and iPads. Unconventional neglectful childhoods lead to tortured but brilliant adults. We are creating the next generation of creators. And in the meantime, we’re raking in the big bucks from our Instagram sponsors, such as Celsius, the US Marine Corps, and the state of Wyoming.
Unfortunately, we have experienced a bit of a dip in our YouTube viewership analytics—there’s another family that lives in an even smaller van with an extra child plus TWO Great Danes. Naturally, we’re looking for ways to differentiate ourselves.
We’re considering submarine life.