Monday, March 24, 2008

Spring Break Outing

The kids and I had an excellent outing to Arbor Hills Nature preserve in Plano last week. It was the first day of Spring Break and I really wanted to make the most of it. Rain was predicted for later in the day which motivated us to get going early. I often need a bit of extra motivation.


Over hill and dale.It is so nice that they are big enough to go at their own pace, but mostly keep up. And I don't have to have them in my direct sight every single moment.But then Benjamin got a scratch and threw a fit. He is in a "glass half empty" stage. At least that's what I keep telling myself.
Eventually he got past it.

We even discovered a pond that I have never seen before even though we have hiked here several times.I was hoping we might see some wildflowers and I brought my Texas Wildflowers Guide, but I think we were a week or two too early.

We did find FOUR letterboxes! We haven't been letterboxing in a long long time. (For information about Letterboxing see here or here, or enter "letterbox" in the search window at the top of my blog and read about our various adventures.)

Benjamin caught me and Claire in a candid photo while we were entering our personal stamps into one of the logbooks. We were especially thrilled to find a St. Patrick's Day themed letterbox since it was actually St. Patrick's Day. (You can see we forgot to wear green.) We also found an Easter themed letterbox... perfect timing. It was entirely coincidental. These just happened to be newish boxes at this particular location.

We saw some very weird blobs of stuff made by some kind of flying bug. Interesting.
We also found the remains of some kind of bees' nest.On the way home, we picked up sushi and raspberries for lunch. Yum.
We spent the rest of spring break playing games, cleaning our rooms and taking a short trip to San Antonio. Back to "normal" tomorrow.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

First nests- mud dauber wasps, second one was paper wasps. Lunch really looks wonderful. It still amazes me that your kids eat sushi. Nice to know someone has adventursome kids (I love sushi and sashimi and always have. Also calamari, escargot, etc).

teri

momma helen said...

What a delight not to have to watch your kids every second.

And I love the B photo. "Wait, son, stay right there. I want to get a picture of your sadness." ;)
I've got a picture of charlie just beginning a tantrum when he was about 2. I actually really like it.

Gerrie said...

Great fun! I have tried to get Steph into the letter boxing. Seems like fun.

kathy said...

what a great family outing! Now that the snow is SLOWLY disappearing my thoughts are turning to letterboxing again. No fun digging through snowpiles to get to them. And I'm surprised at the lack of green in Texas...not sure why I should be! Thanks for this little glimpse of your family life.

CF said...

I am interested in finding out more about the letterboxing. Read the FAQ's on Atlas Quest, but wondering if there are any personal experience/tips that I should know before taking SG, YTBN and Jake off on a quest. Are there a number of trails in our area?