A Hiking Adventure

Matthew and I went on a hiking adventure a few days ago. It's been rainy a lot and I've been feeling bad that I haven't taken Matthew outside to play more, so a few days ago we went for a little walk on the farm roads behind my parent's house.

I knew it was muddy, and I also know Matthew likes to splash in mud puddles, so I put on his rain boots, we packed up some little things in his back pack (rain coat, sippy cup, goldfish crackers) and went on our way.

What I didn't think of was that the rain boots are a little bit harder for him to walk in. Ten minutes or so into our "adventure" while trying to walk around a big mud puddle, Matthew stumbled and fell right into the mud. It was a MUD puddle too, not those watery wet ones that are mostly brown water. He got thick mud all over his hands, arms and knees and started to cry. I felt so bad. I wiped him off as best as I could with my sweatshirt and we sat down and had some goldfish crackers and a drink from the sippy cup. He felt a little better after that.

He loved carrying his backpack.

At one point he insisted that we play "following the leader." I tried to take a picture of him following me.

He points out one of his favorite landmarks on the farm: a giant mound of dirt known as "the big hill."

Here's Matthew after falling in the mud puddle and then being cleaned up.
You can see his muddy knees.

He still wanted to stop and collect rocks along the way, so we kept them in this special rock sized compartment on the backpack. Such a boy.

It started to mist a little bit as we were getting home. He got to take a bath when we got home and he liked that, so I hope he wasn't too traumatized by the mud puddle incident. We'll try it again another day.