Last chance.
After spending all day Saturday dressed in our PJs and rooted to the Wii, the husband and I decided that Sunday we would venture out in to the great outdoors and expose our kids to some nature, lest they start fearing the sunlight. So, we packed a picnic lunch, put on our day clothes, and headed over to a local state park to hit some walking trails.
Now, ideally this little excursion would go off without a hitch. There was nothing complicated in the equation. Sit down, eat sandwiches, walk through the woods, go home. Except of course for the fact that when you go anywhere with children, plans are often abandoned in favor of getting whoever is screaming the loudest to pipe down.
The photo above is the first picture we took, barely thirty feet in to the nature trail that curved through an open canopy of trees I could never identify (except for the orange trees, which were, you know, bearing oranges.) If you’ll notice, my two year old is not smiling. He’s also exiled himself to the opposite end of the tree trunk, perhaps correctly assuming that his siblings have the cooties.
Let me just say, it was downhill from here.
Now, you’d assume that as experienced parent’s, we would know that taking a child on an outing during said child’s routine nap time would be a recipe for disaster.
We actually do know this, we just chose to completely disregard that fact.
After several minutes of bird watching and stump sitting…
the two year old began to have a major walking meltdown. It would have been difficult to spot any wildlife within a three mile radius of this…
There was loud monkey screeching to accompany the look of discomfort on this child’s face. If there was anything alive anywhere on this nature trail, it probably headed out to the nearest freeway in favor of some peace, quiet, and a permanent asphalt nap. For a good twenty minutes, this kid was howling because he adamantly refused to let dad carry him. By this time the rest of the children were wondering aloud where the exit was, how far the minivan was from the trail, and why mom had been so dense as to leave the Gatorade in the trunk.
Almost an hour later…
Nature kicked totally kicked their butts.