Adventures in the park

There is a neat park called OP Schnabel Park not too far from our home, with a playground, pavilion, and wooded walking trails. I took Caleb and Ella there this past week, just for some good exercise and outside time--and they loved it! It had been raining before we got there, so the park was empty for a while; they played on the playground, and then we started our adventures into the woods :) Caleb is very imaginative--if you join him in his little world, he is much more persuadable--and I think we were doing Robin Hood or something as we walked in the woods, picking up sticks that sometimes served as walking sticks and sometimes as "bow-and-arrows". And swords, of course :)

We saw other little families walking on the trails; a little "hut" that some kids had constructed in the woods off the trail; and even a deer! Caleb wanted to feed it rocks, lol, and then he kept calling it a goat.

(Can you see the deer in the background?)

Ella, bringing up the rear with stick & snacks

Caleb, fearlessly leading the way!

Eventually, wandering off the trail, we found deer droppings, and I urged the kids not to step in them. I guess I urged too hard or too seriously, because every time we saw droppings after that, Ella shrieked, "Poot! Poot!" and tried to scramble into my arms. I had to giggle a little :)

When we were about to leave, I saw the craziest thing--I heard a "whooosh" over my head, and turned to see a hawk in pursuit of some kind of blackbird. The blackbird made a fatal mistake, running into one of the pillars of the pavilion, and the hawk flew down, out of my line of sight, to the base of the pillar. A few minutes later I looked over just as the hawk flew off with a mangled, black lump of feathers in its beak. Whoah.