Masse Family: Sunday Hike

Yesterday (Saturday), we had 10 yards of bark mulch delivered to our house to spread around our flower beds, gardens, etc. Dan worked from basically sun up to sun down with some help from me and the munchkins (in my defense, I had a baby shower to attend in the middle of the day). Shockingly it was all done before the kid's bedtime. We rewarded ourselves this morning by going on a hike. There are so many conservation areas, town forests, parks with trails, etc around here that I think we could hike a different place each day for a month and never drive more than 15 minutes to get there. Today we went to a conservation area in Pelham that had a small enough loop for the kiddos to do.

Sebastien was very excited. He's been watching a lot of Dora the Explorer lately and she does a lot of trail hiking and map consulting. Sebastien insisted on holding the map and telling us where we were going. Genevieve (surprise, surprise) did a lot of singing as she walked.

This was a little stream flowing under a big boulder (named Phoebe Rock, according to the map, and delighting Sebastien) that I thought was pretty.

Shortly after seeing this rock and depsite my preventative measures, I discovered a tick on Sebastien neck. Dan, prepared as always, got it out with tweezers. Sebastien is not a fan of the tick removal process and he was pretty upset. Luckily getting to then ride in the kid backpack consoled him. (Side note, Genevieve had a tick in her thigh and thought it rather amusing to watch Dan pull it out.) (Second side note, I HATE TICKS!)

Here is Dan carrying Sebastien.

And here's me carrying Genevieve. We eventually put her in the backpack for our own sanity. There's only so many times she could stop and do the hokey-pokey before we realized we were never going to finish the trail at that pace.