Umstead and 54 cents

We've had a string of good weather, bad weather, good weather, bad weather. Well, yesterday (after a very long week of bad weather) was a beautiful good weather day. Even though we have tons of things on our "to do" list, I pretty much insisted that we do something outside as a family. The kids couldn't decide if they wanted to take me to Umstead (where they've been with daddy) or if we wanted to take daddy to Blue Jay Point (where they've been with me). We settled on Umstead mostly because it's closer and I wanted to mix it up a little bit.

The kids were pretty funny - after we were hiking on an unpaved trail for about 5 minutes, they suddenly got very concerned that we were lost. Nevermind that there were several other families hiking near us and we were definitely not lost. Once we convinced them that we were not lost, we found a creek and they were side-tracked with all of that. Kate loved watching Todd jump from rock to rock to cross the creek back and forth.

After a lot of convincing, we had the kids crossing back and forth too. Amazingly enough, no one ended up in the water - whew! After awhile, we had to hike back up to our car. The whines going back to the car were unreal... well, maybe not unreal, more like very much so expected with a 3 year old and a 4 year old, but still. Geesh! Eventually we got everyone settled so we could hike down to the lake (maybe a quarter mile).

Todd jokingly told Brett that we were going to throw them in to teach them to swim. Kids are pretty gullible :) Obviously, no one got thrown into the lake. I tried to convince the fam to take a trip down to the farmer's market too, but I think everyone had pretty much had enough of the great outdoors and exploring for the day. Kate was asleep before we ever got out of the park!

We had a fun afternoon at home, playing in the yard and pulling weeds. I should've taken pictures of that too, but I didn't. Kate thinks it's great fun to dig in the mulch until she hits the red clay. She is definitely my prissy little tom boy! Todd was trying to cook dinner on the grill and I was trying to finish pulling weeds, so I had to come up with something to sort of occupy the kids (aside from digging in the mulch).

I decided to have them pick up gum balls... you know, those annoying prickly things that fall from the Sweet Gum trees... yeah, I offered a penny for each gum ball they threw in my bucket. 54 cents later, I have 54 fewer gum balls in my front yard :) Thanks, kids!