Sleeping bag and lantern recomendations please

[Holymoly321]

Have just bought our first ever tent! Very excited! Now we need to buy sleeping bags and a lantern so we can see and sleep at night! There is me and DH and 4yrold DS1 and 22mth old DS2. What can people recommend? Our budget is fairly average - but we don't want to have to buy again beacuse of poor quality first time round. I guess we would use the tent through spring, summer, autumn. Re the lantern, are wind-up ones good? Or should we just stick to battery? We'll be doing a lot of reading at night due to getting the boys to bed earlier than us!

I would recommend a small-packing, mummy sleeping bag, Vango do a good range. You can get twin-zip ones. Get 3-4 season if you are a cold sleeper. (you can always unzip if warm). You can get oblong ones too but then there is more air inside to try to warm up.

A self inflating mat is warmest to sleep on - run a mile from airbeds. Cheapo ones don't pack as small but even about 4cm thick will be surprisingly comfortable.

Lantern - i have just bought an LED "UFO" lantern which takes AA batteries, will take some rechargeables. Haven't used it yet though. Wind up ones are quite noisy to wind (the dynamo I guess) which can be a problem if you have sleeping DC's or need to wind up late at night. TBH a cheap LED head torch gives best light for reading!

There's a rechargeable lamp in TEsco at the moment I htink. We paid £13 for it. Would easily last a weekend but seems to take 24 hours to recharge so maybe not for a longer time. But the light is very bright.

I think the wind up ones don't last very long before you have to rewind.

this year i bought some solar fairy lights from argos. 16.57 for a sting of 50 little stars. They're very pretty but they also turn on automatically when it gets dark and off in the morning when it gets light. They give off enough light to see by and stop lo's getting scared if they wake up in the night. And best of all, no batteries required. For reading get a headlamp, sport and soccar are doing them for a fiver each, however you will need one each cos the kids will fight over them :-)