Nature Sunday

When I was growing up, occasionally life would get all together too frustrating & my parents would decide that we, as a family, all needed to spend some time just getting away from our normal day-to-day routine & would pile all five of us kids in our old Suburban for what my mom called a "Nature Sunday!"

We'd just get in the car & go. Most often, our goal was to find something beautiful & natural but sometimes we'd just end up driving around the city & listening to my parents tell us stories of the Valley as they remembered it growing up. We'd sing church songs or Styx, Eagles, Boston, even Bread but our favorite to sing would be Disney songs. We didn't even need the music to sing almost any tune from any Disney animated feature you could come up with. It didn't matter where we ended up or what we talked or sang about doing it, those memories of doing that together are some of my most precious.

So Sherawn & I have carried this tradition on into our little family as well! Today was another Nature Sunday where we piled into our truck with Patsi & Caleb (our two dogs) & hit the road. We couldn't go too far because Caleb has a nasty history of being violently car-sick, so we went to the local park where we had a fun walk & where the dogs considerably expanded their territory by marking every tree, bush, & trashcan they could lift their legs at.

It was Caleb's birthday yesterday & we didn't get to celebrate all that much since I've been really busy with my new job & Sherawn's been working on her two online classes she had to take in order to walk at her graduation from NPC because the stupid college didn't accept all of her credits that she earned from MCC this previous semester (jerks...). So we had a pirate-themed birthday party for him! He had a blast! We made peanut butter cracker sandwiches & ran around through the park together. He is 4 years old (or 28 in dog-years, same age as his daddy!).

The dogs are so tuckered out now from their day at the park that they look like dead doggies! Here's a couple of pics of Caleb from our day today!

I'm really excited for kids of our own to enjoy this awesome family tradition of breaking the norm & getting outside to enjoy the world around us together!