Hiking, Painting & Petting

HARDCORE HIKERS

A couple of Saturdays ago Tim decided to let me sleep in and took the kids (in their pajamas, no less) on a hike by our house. This is the phone picture I received in my nice and warm bed. What can I say, our kids are hardcore hikers.

ABQ ZOO

The weather is unbelievable here. I totally understand why the elderly retire here. The winters are mild which means no shoveling of your drive way. Also, most people don't have grass here, so that means no mowing of the lawn. It's a retiree's dream. Anyway, that's besides the point. The zoo. With the weather being nice, they had a lot of animals out for petting and boy did Miles LOVE that.

Graham is always giggly and down for anything-- such a chill child he is.

FINGER PAINTING

Wow! Finger painting with a toddler is A LOT of work. It's not as easy as getting the paint out and saying, "have at it kid!" It takes major preparation and clean-up for just a measly 10 minutes of creativity. Sometimes I ask myself if it's worth it, but then I see his little smudge marks and finger prints and it makes me smile, so yeah it's worth it. Be prepared Grandmas and Grandpas for painted pictures in the mail. Miles LOVED finger painting so I'm sure we'll be doing that again real soon.

And, once again Graham just sat on the sidelines cheering Miles on and played with his chubby toes.

SANDIA MAN CAVES

This was a relatively easy hike, but had a drop off on one side so I had to keep extremely close tabs on Miles and Gus. This cave was discovered in the late 30's and when they excavated it they found skeletal remains of many ice aged animals, such as the wooly mammoth, mastadon and a giant sloth. Also deep inside the cave were arrow heads, remnants of baskets and yucca moccasins, but no human remains were ever found. They believed the cave was a seasonal retreat for a single man about 10,000-12,000 years ago. To get to the cave you have to hike along a concrete ledge and climb up a rickety metal spiral stair case up a sheer rock face. It's not the most kid friendly hike we've ever done, but the history of it was really interesting.

We hiked during Graham's nap time so his head was bobbing everywhere as he tried to catch some shut eye, but to no avail. You can tell how tired he was in the picture below.

It's a really interesting piece of history and it's too bad people have defaced it with graffiti.

Good times were had by all. There is nothing better than hiking on a sunny day with the fam.