Well, What Do Ya Know?

Some of you may be checking in to see if we got out of these four walls for our pledged 45 minutes today. I am happy to say that, indeed, we did! Actually, we took a walk for over an hour with my sister and her baby! Woo hoo :) (Nothing like a little internet accountability to get your buns moving, eh?). That's what I always say.

And what do you know, we had a great time! It was 30 degrees with a little wind, making it feel more like the mid-20s, but we were bundled up and walking at a decent pace much of the time, so we kept fairly toasty. My kiddos ran hard and got all kinds of energy out. Yay for that! As a bonus, we were able to collect a small assortment of evergreen cones along the way and score some quality nature study time. Big yay for that! It all started with one very large cone that I think is a fir cone of some sort. A little collection followed and we started to pay attention to the needles on the same trees, hoping to get an I.D. on a few. We had a hard time remembering once we got back home to the field guides, though. SweetP had an excellent plan of going back out tomorrow with the sole intent of I.D.-ing the trees we collected the cones from today. Splendid idea, SweetP! I think we will :)

During Little Dude's nap the girls started drawing some of the cones. Then we got out a little paint and tried rolling the cones in it to see how they'd print on paper. Not very well. But, they make great alternative brushes and we had some nice scratch effects going on by scraping the paint with the cones in a sort of combing fashion. Plus it's just always great fun to get paint all over you when you're a kid :)

So, we logged an hour and fifteen minutes on our winter nature walk. Considering the mid-20s temp and the fact that we are smack in the middle of moving, I feel pretty good about that. I'm still keeping 45 minutes as my official pledge, but we'll try for more if we can.

I'll let you know how our pine/spruce/fir cone identifications progress :) For now, here are some pics from the day... Thanks for checking up on us!!!