Life is a Bowl of Cherries

I know that many of you are waiting for a health update on my 2 older girls, as they have had plenty of testing and procedures lately.  I appreciate your support and concern, but I'll be getting to all of that in my next post.  In my last post, I unloaded about the rough week or so that we had recently, and I promised to follow up with a post about how we made up for it once everyone was feeling better.

By the time Chloe's eye had healed, Quinn's concussion and sprained neck were better and Cassidy had completely gotten over strep throat (and the allergic reaction to the first antibiotic), I think we were all ready for some fresh air and sunshine, and probably a little comfort food.  So we spent the next couple of weeks packing plenty of that stuff in.

First, we went hiking. A lot.  I love hiking, and so do the kids.  Sometimes people seem shocked by the fact that my small children will hike 2 or 3 miles with me in an afternoon, which I find puzzling.  It's not as though I drag them out in shackles and force them down a rocky desert landscape!  I think that, given the chance, most kids enjoy walking around in the woods, checking stuff out, which is really what a hike is.  My kids are far more interested in the plants and landscape and animals that we see than they are in any movie or TV show!  So we often, actually very often, pack a lunch and find a sprawling nature center, reserve or wooded park to hike through, and the kids love it!

 We hiked through woods and fields. We saw wild raspberries, deer, toads, chipmunks and honeysuckle.

We walked on boardwalks through marshland, and found aquatic plants, tadpoles, frogs and fish.

We looked up at the trees and the sky and the birds.





















We looked down at the trails and the creeks and all of the magic they held.

At the end of the day, every day that we hiked, I had a group of happy, healthy, tired kids.  Kids that woke up the next day and turned off the TV,
begging to go hiking again.  Fantastic!















In between our hiking adventures, we went cherry picking and stocked up on jam from the fruit.  Stay tuned for the recipes in my next post!