A couple of weeks ago I was taking some pictures of Heather by the window. I like this one best. This was with the 50mm prime lens again. I really like this lens, something about the images it produces is very pleasing, but I can’t say what.
The focus is just a bit off from her eyes, but that’s what happens with a squirmy kid and f/1.8. Maybe one day I’ll be good enough to catch it just right.
Heather helped me bake some oatmeal cookies last Sunday. We were getting out all the ingredients (one of her favorite things to do) and she asked if she could eat some oats. Well, why not? So I gave her a few. And she loved them. So she asked for more, and more, and more. I think she ate over a 1/8 of a cup before I cut her off. Just raw, rolled oats. What a goon.
Heather has watched a number of TV show episodes that involve camping. So when, a few months back, we asked her if she wanted to go camping she was ecstatic. She knew all about it. She told us about setting up a tent, and sleeping bags, and a fire, and marshmallows, and on and on. We decided to play it safe for a first-time-camping experience. We booked a site at Del Valle, which is just on the edge of town, for a Friday night back in August. If the night turned into a disaster we could just bail and drive home since we’d only be 15 minutes away.
In the future we won’t be returning to Del Valle. Apparently it’s kind of a party campground. There aren’t enough bushes and trees to separate camp sites so it’s mostly like camping in a huge group with a bunch of people you don’t want to interact with. Regardless, Heather had a blast. She ate a hot dog in a bun for the first time and she had her first S’more. She thought the S’more was alright, but wanted the marshmallow and chocolate without the graham crackers (funny, since this morning she ate an entire package of graham crackers).
We survived the night, went home and then everyone took a 3-hour nap.
Last weekend was the Daddy-Daughter Campout with church, for which Heather was also super excited. It was up in Redwood Regional Park. The main benefit there is that it’s a singular group site. There are no other camp sites around it so you have much more isolation. That and there are a lot of trees and bushes. The camp site is a cleared area within all this growth. That was a more pleasant experience overall.
Heather was a trooper and didn’t even fuss when it was discovered I had not, in fact, packed the hot dog buns and ketchup like I thought I had. She happily ate her hot dog without either. My night would have been a little more comfortable had I checked the air mattress before leaving though. It had a pretty substantial hole in it so I was flat on the ground by midnight. Heather slept great on a pile of blankets.
She’s already asking when we can go camping again. So I guess we need to start buying useful equipment instead of just making do with whatever we can find.
The second week was lots of hanging around. The cousins all had a blast playing together. You can see one of my notebooks in these pictures on the table. That was just half the reading for the deterrence class. Once I was back for the weekend we went to the Dallas Aquarium.
And here’s a video of Heather playing with the hose:
Heather’s been asking to go camping for a few weeks now (I had mentioned the possibility at some point, which she latched on to. She knows all about camping from an episode of Bubble Guppies. She’ll talk about having a tent and sleeping bags and a campfire and roasting marshmallows…). We are planning on going camping in a couple of weeks, but I mentioned to her we could go hiking sometime too. And we talked about her riding in the child-carrier backpack.
So last weekend I got it out and we went walking around the neighborhood for a while. Then she became slightly obsessed with going hiking. So I said we’d go hiking this weekend. Sadly, that promise was made before we knew it was going to be over 100 degrees this weekend. Regardless, she was super excited to go hiking today, so I looked for some place shady that might be a little cooler. We ended up at Redwood Regional Park on the edge of Oakland. It was probably about 10 degrees cooler than Livermore, which was at least something and there was a lot of shade for most of the trail.
We picked up some sandwiches and headed off for adventure. At the parking lot for the trail-head (which was packed) we ate our lunch. Jess, not being one for hiking what with her knees not being in very good shape, opted for sitting in the shade at the trail-head reading. Heather and I packed up and began our trek.
We hiked just about 2.5 miles. Heather was in the backpack somewhere from 1/2 to 2/3 of the hiking. She loved it, though she was pretty worn out by the end (and so was I). I had her on my back and the CamelBak on my front full of water and snacks.
On the way home we went to Chick-fil-A since none of us had enough energy left to think about making dinner. Hopefully the next time we go hiking it won’t be quite so hot.