Snowshoes

Last winter, I thought I had found a diamond in the rough at our local St. Vincent de Paul store (like Goodwill). I found a brand new, unused pair of LL Bean kid snowshoes. Shawn wasn't all that impressed because they weren't a typical St. Vincent price of a few dollars. But they were a little less than half of the regular price and they were new with tags. So I figured it was still a good deal.
We had about 6 inches of snow come down Monday night, so there was some nice powder Tuesday morning. It kept snowing off an on throughout the day too. So after lunch we set out on a short snowshoe hike.
One reason I really like where we live is that our property backs up to forest service land. So we literally walked back between the fence and hiked into the forest beyond our backyard. We didn't get very far though. Carly got tired pretty quickly, but I was impressed that she didn't complain. She really seemed to enjoy the adventure of it all. She wanted me to carry her towards the middle of the hike, but I already had Isaac on my back. To keep the mood up, we turned our hike into a Dora the Explorer episode. If you've never seen a Dora show, then let me tell you, you're missing out. The basic concept for each episode is to go from point A to B to C and overcome an obstacle at each point. So just after we turned around to walk back and Carly was very tired, I told her we just had to go to the "hill, fence, and our backyard". Then we sang some of the songs from the show and replaced the words with ones that would fit our adventure. I was very glad that this kept her in a good mood. We've had some rough times lately with lot of drama especially between her and I. So going through a complete activity from start to finish with her and not having any issues was a huge blessing. All three of us, and Knox-Lee's dog, had a good time.

Trudging onward

Knox up ahead and running free

Isaac hanging out on my back. We just love this carrier.

self portraits

and a sneeze