Nature Walk

Recently, we got a whole bunch of rain over a couple of days, and afterwards the weather was just beautiful, so we decided to take a long walk along the greenway in Jamestown. There were tons of big puddles and the creek was super high.

Irene was, by far, the cutest things out there. She just went nuts over the puddles. She would scream, "MORE PUDDLES?!?!" 

And then run and jump in them.

She tried to get Olivia to come jump in a few, too.

There were several places where the runoff made streams across the path and Ezra liked to drop a leaf on the water and watch it float.

Olivia turned it into an olympic event, leaping across the streams.

The littles were just so happy to splash!

Gabe wasn't shy about it either. 

The rain on the grass made for some pretty sights.

Then Gabe found a wild honeysuckle vine and stopped for a snack, which then turned into a free-for-all on the honeysuckle. 

There was so much of it along the path that we kept having to push the kids along or they'd have spent all day on one vine. :)

Normally, you can get down and walk along the creek on the rocks, but this day, the creek was well above normal, so we were lucky to even have a place to take a picture.

Around this point, Rebecca had to run to a class, so we soldiered on, planning to meet in a park along the trail later, where she would pick us up so we didn't have to walk all the way back.

We found a flood gauge that showed that the creek was 3.5 feet above normal!

After hiking so far (at least 2 miles), we found the park and decided to take a break from walking and play on the playground for a while.

My goodness! These two really are peas in a pod, both in looks and personality!

After a good long while on the playground, Rebecca's class wasn't quite done, so we got back on the path and the kids found this huge stick they wanted to bring home. It was really a sapling that had fallen over sometime in the recent past. They though tit was great fun to work together carrying it. Ezra wasn't so much into the teamwork thing, though, preferring to sit it out and walk on his own.

We kept going on the path until we found a nice, gentle stream that wouldn't wash us all away. 

The kids took off their boots and socks and played in the stream for a bit until I heard from Rebecca that she was on her way.

On the way back, we took a side path that should have led us back into the park by the playground, but, despite the beautiful butterflies (or maybe because I was distracted by them ;), I got lost. Rebecca called me and managed to talk me out of the woods before we died. ;)