A Park Finale

Friday Bryan came for a rare lunch at home, and said, "Tomorrow isn't supposed to be raining.  How about doing a park day altogether."  My response?  "If it's not raining shouldn't we be out in the yard working to get it cleaned out for winter?"  But as he knew it would, the idea grew on me.  A park day...a finale to all the park days we've had this summer...with Bryan...after an enormously stressful work week...time with the boys...weighed against yard work...  Well, by the end of the day it sounded like splendid idea and I'm so thankful we went.  The sun shown brilliantly and it was such fun to spend a day as a family just having fun.

We went to Washington Park in Anacortes.  It was a park we had never been to before, had a play ground and walking paths so it fit all our criteria. 

After lunch we played on the playground for a while. 

Micah seemed pretty overwhelmed at first.

Maybe just a little too tall...

Brandon wanted a drink before we went on our hike, so he tried to get one out of this fountain.
He tried getting the water to run and drinking it at the same time, but he wasn't quite tall enough
or coordinated enough to get both happening at the same time.  So he filled up the bowl
and lapped it out of there.  It was pretty funny to watch, but may be not so clean...

There was a loop that looked pretty simple to walk around, so we decided to go for it.  It ended up being about two and a half miles up and down hill.  Lots of people drove by us, but there were others walking as well.  Brandon's asthma kicked in pretty badly about half way there in the dense and moist forest so I ended up carrying him half the way.  I debated just turning around but Bryan insisted that we keep going cause we were probably over halfway already.  I'm glad he insisted because we broke out of the trees at the top and the view was tremendously spectacular with the sun shining so brightly.

Following the "rules" by touching the water.

Brandon insisted on pushing Micah for quite a while.  It was pretty steep but they had fun.

My favorite picture from the whole day...a boy and his dad simply watching life happen together.

The view from the top.

A fun Brandon sequence.

And of course I had to play a little bit with my camera. 

So poignant...A flower struggling to survive as the rest of the world around it turns brown in hibernation.

When we got back to the playground we did a little more climbing before heading home.  Brandon wasn't quite sure about being up so high.  I, on the other hand, was trying to figure out a way to get higher.  ;)  Unfortunately, I'm just not as dexterous as I used to be.

And that was our day of play and de-stressing.  I'm so thankful God gives us the ability to play and enjoy each other.  Once I got my mind wrapped around the idea that it was okay not to work on a Saturday, that's exactly what we did.

Blessings on the rest of your week.