Today we went for a hike at Crow Hassan Park Reserve. Anyone who knows us knows that this is kind of "our" place. Today it was fabulous as usual. There was a lot of fluffy snow around and it was pretty warm, about 30 degrees.
Esme was super excited to go hiking. We told her that we expected her to hike quite a bit and that we weren't going to be carrying her the whole time. She often rides in the backpack but we didn't bring it because she's getting a little big for it even without snow pants on. She was sure she could do it. Especially when we promised a movie when we got home if she did a good job.
As usual, the first thing Esme did was get a map, plan our hike, and direct us where to go. It's the same map every time, obviously, but she always gets a new one and studies it very intently before we set off. Funny thing is, no matter which way we go we always follow her plan exactly to the tee.
Before we got too far into our hike - think one city block - Esme was tired and wanted to be carried. So much for enthusiasm! I knew that Aaron's idea of a hike and Esme's were quite different and I fully expected a meltdown by someone (possibly me) before the hike was over. I knew Aaron would never shorten his plan for the hike for the day and so my best bet was to try to make it as fun for Esme as I could and let Aaron know that if someone was going to carry the 42lb-even-without-snow-gear-on girl it was not going to be me. It took quite a bit of cajoling to get Esme to carry on at times, but she was a trooper all the way and it went way better than I anticipated. Aaron's idea turned out to be not a bad one afterall.
One trick we used was telling her that she could eat all the white snow (but never the yellow!) she wanted. This slowed us down quite a bit for a time, but she loved it. Eat snow, take 2 steps, stop, repeat.
And finally we had her race with us and the dogs, making Airplane Arms to help with speed of course, and also to see if she could get Kaiser to play. She did.
As we got closer to the end of the walk Esme fell down in the snow and looked like she might cry. She was pretty tired after her long (what in the end turned out to be 1hr and 45 minute) hike. But we distracted her by asking her to make some snow angels and that cheered her right up. We made a few more on the way back to the car. Disaster averted!
Pretty good snow angel huh? :)
The one and only real glitch of the whole day was that I lost my gloves on the trail somewhere. Aaron was going to back track with Kaiser to find them and Esme, Cricket and I would carry on towards the car, but Kaiser was having none of that. He did not want to go back and Cricket was freaking out that her people were going in two different directions. We decided to abort that plan and hope that I'll be able to get them tomorrow if we go for another hike. Or maybe someone will find them and put them up on the board in the parking lot.
Anyway, when we got back to the car, Esme and the dogs were exhausted, Aaron was happy and I was thrilled that everyone was happy and/or exhausted. There should be some good sleeping happening tonight! Let's hope!
Here are a few more pictures that I took today.
Happy Saturday!
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