Nature Hike (In Our Backyard)

On Friday, the weather was really nice, so I took the kids outside in the woods. We pretended we were explorers searching for treasures.

As you can see, neither kid has their "woods legs" yet. Isabella is much more cautious, by nature, so as soon as she would start slipping, she would sit down. Nicholas was running down the hills, and would do a full slip-on-a-banana-peel fall, roll over, get up, and start running again.

This is Taylor and Shea's fort that they made with friends the first summer that we moved in. (4 1/2 years ago) Still intact and quite impressive. It's a little tight inside, but I am sure Nicholas and Isabella will be able to continue building it sometime in the future to enlarge it and make it usable.

Here they are very impressed that they are capable of shaking a tree so hard that the entire thing moves. It was about an inch in diameter.

This is my favorite tree in our entire back yard. I know it's just a stump, but it was once a really huge tree. The tree was cut down a really really long time ago because the remains of the stump are very brittle and soft. I'd like to imagine that this tree was cut down maybe 100 years ago. And if the tree was that big 100 years ago, how long before that was it planted? Our development is new as of about 10 years ago, so why was this big tree cut down? I would love to find out the history of who lived on this land way back when.

This is in the side of our yard, and I am not even sure if this is our property or not, but the kids love to throw rocks and sticks in this creek and see how big of a splash they can make.

This was Isabella's first attempt at photography. Not too bad. She managed to get my entire body centered perfectly in the next picture. These don't look too different than the pictures I take. Is she that good, or do I take photos like a 3 year old?

After so many pictures, they were no longer willing to smile. They tried to give me their scariest faces.

And the winner is.......