Getting Out

Tuesday of last week I declared to Josh that I didn't want to look back on this summer and realize we spent every evening in front of the television.  It's easy to do.  We both get home from work, I make dinner and by the time everything is said and done, all we want to do is zone out.  The nights that Josh works late or I plan a more elaborate dinner make this worse.  Toby doesn't typically allow me to disappear into the kitchen to cook dinner and our kitchen isn't really set up to handle him.  The more elaborate the dinner, the longer it takes and the messier the aftermath is.  SO, my new goal for the remainder of the summer is to plan simple quick meals for dinner so we can have some time in the evenings for some outdoor time.  We have a really nice walking trail about 5 minutes away from us, a couple of small parks with play structures for Toby, and we could at least spend the evening in the backyard if nothing else.  Tuesday night we had a quick dinner of chicken sausages from Costco (yum) and several different fresh veggies from the garden.  After the nice easy cleanup we went down to the walking trail and walked for about an hour.  Toby spent most of the time in the stroller.  We tried to let him walk a bit but the sidewalk was pretty rough so he fell and scraped his knee pretty bad.  All and all, the walk was lovely and successful.  The trip to the park afterwards was NOT a success.  Toby, who usually loves to swing, had a meltdown on the swing.  Sadly, the park was not very well maintained so there was broken glass and trash everywhere so we couldn't really let him run around.  We finally left with Toby in tears.  Perhaps a different playground next time.

Since then, we've been doing great.  We've going down to the walking trail almost every evening since.  On a work retreat last week I discovered a really great hiking area that is quite close.

 view from the bridge

 waterfall created by a dam

 ducks on the water

We went there on Sunday and had a lovely hike around the lake.  Toby rode in the Ergo.  Not the most hiking friendly carrier, especially on some of the steeper hill that were on this hike but it worked.  We may start looking for a frame carrier for him and we are hoping to let him do some himself as he gets older.

I hope we continue to do this.  Toby is an active kiddo and I want to make sure we can keep up with him.  We love hiking and got out of the habit of it a few years ago so I would really like to make this a part of our lives again.