Spring Break

 It's spring break for us!  If I were 20 years younger it's possible that spring break would have meant living it up in Florida/Mexico/anywhere other than rainy Puget Sound.  Actually, it wouldn't have been that kind of spring break for me, but I can pretend.  But onto today's reality.  This year for spring break we decided to actually capitalize on the sunshine (something virtually nonexistent in Western Washington), and take a couple of day trips.  People who know us would not classify our family as "outdoorsy".  In fact, a few people in my family may be allergic to fresh air.  So you can imagine the surprise in my kids when we told them we were going to take a drive to hike to some waterfalls.  We were not met with overwhelming excitement, but we forced them to go anyway.  We needed to get out of the house and hoped that Aaron would behave.

There were three awesome parts to Day Trip #1.  Destination: waterfalls.

1.  Aaron was contained in the car for a one hour drive, for a total of two hours.  Nice.  There's not much he can ruin buckled up in the car.  Except for that one time where he got totally naked while he remained buckled up.  Oh and then there's the time that he opened the door while I was driving.  Never mind.  There are all sorts of things he can do in the car, but this time he sat quietly (most of the time).

2.  We learned that Aaron has a healthy fear of waterfalls.  You can get fairly close to one of the waterfalls, and when we were trying to walk down there Aaron formed a death grip on Husband's hand.  Husband was gently encouraging him and he was having nothing to do with it.  When your minimally verbal kid says "NO WATER", you aquiesce to his request. We were thrilled at the development that he had a fear of danger (at least this dangerous situation).

3.  We all got to see nature AND get exercise.  Double bonus.  We could have done without the incessant complaining from the 15 year-old who would rather have been killing imaginary bad guys on the XBox than spending the day enjoying God's creation with his family, but I'm pretty sure at 15 I would have been complaining too.  Now exercise isn't something that Aaron is really a fan of.  I suppose if he were having to run to get the last chocolate chip cookie before I ate it he wouldn't mind it so much.  But to walk for the sake of walking...not so much.  He was a good sport for a long time (like 30 minutes).  He got to flap his hands at the fish in the fish hatchery, and again at the rushing of the waterfalls.  But walking for the sake of walking got old real fast.  Eventually whenever we got to a fork in the trail, and we would stop so the four of us could argue discuss which way to go, Aaron would plop down and refuse to get up.  After a few times of his sit-in protesting, we decided to head back so we wouldn't have to carry him out of there!  We had some good laughs over his refusal to get up and how ridiculous we must have looked trying to get this kid to keep walking.

All in all the trip was a success (especially since he got a donut out of the deal).  It was a great way to kill 5 hours, and he didn't ruin a thing!  Yay for Day 1.  Only 6 more days to go!