masonsnakeThis is mainly a post about Whitney’s reward. A couple of weeks ago she had an awards assembly at school and did really well. We told her that she could pick a movie to go to as a reward. She wanted to see a Bridge to Terabithia, but I knew that both Mason (who is sad when lions kill baby antelopes on Animal Planet) and Whitney would be disturbed by the ending, so I told them what happens in the end and Whitney agreed it would be too sad to see.

So she decided to go hiking. Her and I went hiking a while back down by Fredericksburg, and she really loved it, and wanted to go back and show Heidi and Mason how neat it was. She had to sell girl scout cookies first thing in the morning though, so me and Mason killed some time at the pet store. So we went finally got down to the river for the hike, and although it was kind of windy today, once we got into the forest it was great.

Whitney took the lead and remembered just where she wanted to go, to the little stream the empties into the big river. When her and I went last year, she played in the river so that what she wanted to do again, even though it was a lot warmer that day. Me and Heidi wanted to keep going, but the farther we walked past that stream the more morose Whitney became, so finally we just said, “Its her fun day, lets just go back to the stream.”

On our way there, everyone (but me) almost stepped on a snake that was curled up right off the side of the path, so Heidi handed me a “snake stick” (a stick with a forked end) and quickly caught it. Like I said, it wasn’t real warm so the snake was relatively sluggish. They kids wanted to take it home and name it Lightning, but I talked them out of that. We played with it a while, and the kids each held it, and all that body heat eventually made it a little frisky and it bit me, which of course didn’t hurt since it was just a garter snake.

When we got to the little creek, the kids jumped right in, shoes and all. They played there for a while, then we took the pictures on the logs. Mason fell off a different log, and got kind of hurt, then we headed back, which was good since by this time the kids had freezing feet anyway. But they had a great day and a lot of fun.

You can see in one of the pictures that Mason is pretending to be a sloth, and how I got the kids out over the big river to take their pictures,