Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Tent Rocks is a great place to go when the weather is good


The Tent Rocks National Monument is an excellent place to hike with kids ... when the weather is nice.

The hikes are short, less than two miles, and most of the terrain is easy enough for a young kid to go on.

But if the weather is bad, watch out! We were there last weekend and we could see that clouds were starting  to gather, and the sky was getting darker and darker.

The danger is that there could be a flash flood.  I mean, that's how the tent rocks were formed to begin with.  Volcanic rock and sedimentary rock were carved into these gnome village formations through thousand of years of water and wind blowing through them.

As we hiked the sky got darker, and our curiosity led us to go around the next bend, and then the next.  But finally, when we saw flashes of lightning in the sky, we started to go back.

We had to move fast because all the other hikers were hustling to their cars too.  One lady was saying that she's been in a flash flood, and doesn't want to do it again.

When we were only a few hundred yards from the car, a shooter-marble sized hail stone whizzed by our heads.  And then another.  Quinn started to run with Calvin in the backpack, and I ran behind him. We made it underneath a sign, just in time, before the hailstorm really hit. But at least we didn't get hit in the head with hail.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Our kid might not actually like to hike.

It seems weird to admit it, since I have a blog about baby hikes, but I get the feeling that my baby doesn't like to hike.

Or at least I got that feeling when we tried to take him out on Mitchell Trail, by our house, about a month ago.

We thought he needed to work off a little bit of steam and it was as good a day to get him hiking on his own two feet as any.  You know, because so far he's just been riding around in the backpack.

I think that the problem is that he spotted the playground across the street from the trailhead.  When he realized that we were going down the trail, and not to the playground, all hell broke loose.  We carried him kicking and screaming into the trail. We tried to get him to walk, and he just stood there, crying.

Finally we walked ahead of him and waited. He cried like we had abandoned him on the street.  But finally he started to walk down the path towards us. When he walked his twenty feet, we relented, and took him to the playground. No sense in forcing the issue.

But now I realize that we might have to take this hiking thing one step at a time.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Calvin's first haircut - after shot

So here he is on easter morning with his new haircut. I can admit, there were still a few flyaways, but I had to do a sneak attack with the scissors while he was taking a bath.

Calvin's first haircut - before shot

The night before Easter I gave Calvin his first haircut.  Melissa asked me if he was starting to look like a hippie with his long hair....I don't know about that.  He doesn't have enough hair to get a hippie look, or even a girlie look.  He just looks like a mad-scientist.

Here he is watching TV with his perpetual mad-scientist bed hair.

(now I have to go find a picture with his new sophisticated look)

Friday, April 2, 2010