sharon woods

the girls and i went to sharon woods park today and went on a hike on the edward s. thomas trail. we got two more answers for our metro parks passport, i'm very excited!

shelby took her 'telescope.' it's an empty paper towel roll. i was trying to get her to look at squirrels, leaves, etc. but we mostly used it to look at elise and each other :P

at one point there was a tree down in our path. ya know, the guys that we passed coming from the other direction could have let us know! we made it... shelby climbed over it, sorta ;) and i was able to lift and maneuver elise and the stroller over it. it's stephon's fault... the forecast said that it was going to be windy so he warned me to be careful of falling branches and trees.

of course, we know that shelby was collecting sticks the entire way. she found one that was taller than me and carried it for quite awhile, i was impressed!

we hung out on the observation deck that is off of the trail for awhile. shelby played and read the map. that was funny... she mixes babble and real words and acts like she is reading them off of the page. i love it! and i let elise out of the stroller to crawl around. she investigated everything, and taste-tested anything that she could cram into her mouth before i could stop her! mostly it was acorn lids. and maybe one acorn and a leaf. a well rounded diet, really ;) she scratched at the nail heads in the wood and pulled herself up on the railing. it was interesting to watch her investigate the two-foot and under world :)

once we left the observation deck the girls started to fall asleep. i was looking over the stroller at them and not paying attention to the path and i swear i could have hit the deer that walked into the path in front of me! they startled me at first. a mama deer and two baby deer were standing about ten feet in front of me! i could read the number on the tags on their ears. i slowly got my camera, but don't know why i was so slow since my pushing a squeaky stroller down a gravel path didn't even make them pause, and tried to get a couple of pictures. what a time for my camera to be difficult. ugh. anyhow, they were beautiful :) the babies missed the whole thing.

at the end of the trail is schrock lake. shelby had a bit of her peanut butter sandwich left and so did elise, so we fed them to a few ducks. elise was still asleep. shelby kept asking the ducks if they were hungry. it was cute and pretty funny :)