Gotta Get Outa Here!

I have been fine during this whole quarantine thing.  I'm an introvert anyway and loved the excuse to stay home and clear of calendar.  However, with all the house stress and everything else going on, I was really getting kind of down.  I needed change, but wasn't sure what we could actually do outside the home when it was so hot.  A friend of mine was telling me all the things they've been doing and I was realizing almost all our stuff we've been doing has been in our house, crafts, cooking, movies, books, drawing lessons, and more crafts.  The only things out of the house for the family has been church where we can't socialize currently, walks in our neighborhood, and my sister's pool.  

Anyway, my friend gave me some parks and trails to check out and encouraged us to go early in the morning before it's too hot.  We are actually pretty good at getting out of the house early when we plan it, so we planned it and made it happen.  Three mornings a week I go to a Zumba class that I love and so on the other two mornings we're trying to do something other than just walk in our neighborhood now.

The first day, I talked the girls into going willingly by bribing them with breakfast tacos if we just got up and headed straight out the door by 7:30am.  This walking trail was short, about a mile run trip and it had several playgrounds along the way.  Isaac and Drew brought their bikes to ride.  (I could only get two bikes to fit in the trunk of the van.)

This is a pretty cool merry-go-round we found.  It's harder for the older boys to "accidentally" throw off the younger ones with the nice buckets.

The next time we went out, I let the girls sleep in and just took the boys.  Bobby was dying to try his new Stomp Rockets and we wanted to try them in an area without many trees to see how controllable it was and how far it really shot the rockets.  It turned out to be quite a cool morning, relatively speaking of course.  We didn't get back home until 10am, and I never broke a sweat even during our hike.

Playing with the Stomp Rockets

The hike