Today marks 9 years since I became a mom. It seems so long ago, but then again, not so much.
I am a lucky mom to have such a big helper for a son. He has always been so easy-going and really, such a blessing in our family.
When asked what he wanted for his birthday, he said he wanted a new pair of soccer cleats … Lionel Messi cleats, to be exact. We looked online and found a site that was doing 25% off all Messi items, which is quite the deal, being as his stuff is always so expensive.
It has been quite the “Messi” week, as there was some talk of him leaving Barcelona! Anderson was so worried about this, that he taped the soccer news channel for 2 days straight, waking up at 6 am to check what was up.
Good news, Messi will be staying, and that means we get to hang on to our Barcelona jerseys for a little while longer … Unlike the Phoenix Suns Steve Nash jersey that is now collecting dust in the basement.
This morning when I asked Anderson what he wanted to do to start the day, and he said that he wanted to go for a hike. He missed the last one because he had soccer tryouts, and he really wanted to go today.
Adam has spent the whole week so far at a teacher training, so he wasn’t able to come today. We have done it without him before, so I knew it was going to be fine, but he was missed.
We went up our favorite hill (zig-zag hill), but he really wanted to go down the other side to walk the trails that are down there. I made sure that I packed plenty of water, some pretzels and fruit snacks.
It turned out to be about 3 miles total. They all did so great!
Here are some pictures:
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- Starting out. Aussie is ALWAYS thirsty!
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- There were plenty of busy ants making hills.
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- Cute girl.
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- Even without electronics, she still found a way to have a phone conversation. To be honest, I prefer the rock phone over the real one, any day. The conversation she was having was pretty funny.
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- The others decided to have their own conversations via “rock phone.”
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- They found a lot of these little rock faces along the way. It took a lot longer this time up, because they had to climb up all of them. It was fine.
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- Anderson and Aussie were off looking for lizards.
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- Aspen posing. She’s turning into such a girl :).
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- Still chasing lizards.
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- We saw so many that looked just like this. I wouldn’t let them touch them. Not that I am scared or grossed out or anything; I just like them to leave them alone … kind of a respect thing.
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- She was determined to climb all the rock faces alone. She did pretty well.
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- These were the best smelling bushes. They have these cute little flowers all over them, but any time we tried to pick one, it would fall apart. We just left it alone after that.
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- Almost there
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- Anderson peaking at us from the top
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- I love Azure’s little sprint to the top. The hill is nearly a mile up. She did so great!
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- At the top. I promise they had fun 🙂
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- The view of Adam’s future place of employment! Frontier Middle School! Less than 2 miles from our house 🙂
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- We had quite the steep climb down the other side. I carried her the whole way. Good thing she’s a lightweight 🙂
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- At the bottom of the decent. Look how pretty it is back there.
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- Look at the hill!
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- We found a single track the was so fun to walk down!
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- The track is somewhere up in that bunch of weeds.
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- My favorite valley to run in.
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- They were getting stickers out of their shoes and Azure was running after me to get pretzels.
Time to 'fit' it in 
This is refreshing. Good to know that kids do take after their parents to an extent, my nephews would asked for a video game and it would be punishment to take them on a hike!
You know, I think electronics have their place, but they are just not a constant around here. For us, it is about having very few of those things and like you said, show them what awesome things there are outdoors.
I hope they’ll thank us for it one day … or at least keep it up :).