Traipsing through the Forest

I feel a little bad that we've felt that we CAN get out of the house more now that Charlie is in school, we'll just say he's my most unpredictable child and sometimes its just not easy to leave the house with him and his 2 brothers. Anyway, we will definitely have more adventures with Charlie in the future, but for this outing with my two younger boys, we enjoyed running through the forest and I was so grateful that Edwin was so willing to run and even run in the direction we wanted him to run, so I didn't really need to carry him much. Also, Miles and Edwin have never really been that friendly with each other, not really mean, just indifferent to each others' existence, they seem to compete with each other for their parents affection, You can observe them fighting over Max's lap in church. Or maybe we should just be more affectionate parents. haha...anyway...Spending time in the forest does good things for these brothers.

There's Miles, lifting logs again...he must be training for the highland games or something.

You should caption the following photo...

Some captions previously mentioned by friends include...
"When you party like a rock star, sometimes you get a tummy ache."
"I need to lay off the juice boxes?"

Haha anyway, give it a try! 

So the brothers are working on bonding here...

The stump where Miles has many photos...it's falling apart faster than expected.

And there you have it! Quite the pleasant outing. No tears were shed and everyone was happy.

Dahlia Farm

It occurred to me that I still had not made it to the Dahlia farms, ever. I've wanted to go the last couple years, so this year I decided to finally make it happen one morning right after we dropped Charlie off at school. (He didn't want to go anyway! Ha!) We arrived shortly after opening so there weren't many people there.

He was really excited about these snowball ones. 

 And he wanted me to take his photo at every one of these things. Edwin was still attached to my back, I didn't want to bring him out until a little bit more into our outing.

My favorites were the deep red dahlias.

"Miles, that blossom is as big as your head..." then this happened

We did have a lot of fun. Each of the types of flowers had a different fun name so Miles liked hearing all of those...such as Tutti Frutti, blah blah blah, Vixen, and a whole bunch of others I can't think of right now!

And then we released the tiny beast.  He was excited to roam free, pull out signs, climb on irrigation pipes and give me a whole lot of "cheeeeeeee" for photos. (Cheese for those that don't speak 1-year-old)

 

Oh, and he had to keep on sniffing the flowers. 

 

 And Miles was grumpy within an hour so we didn't stay that long and made our way back to the car....and of course, my children were more thrilled with the parking lot flags than the flowers.