so long 2009 — best trip

I haven’t trav­eled since I had the kids. It isn’t in our bud­get and no travel oppor­tu­ni­ties have come up at work so I’ve been home bound. While I may not have hopped on a plane and hap­pily arrived at a new des­ti­na­tion we did a fam­ily 0uting that I think counts as a trip that I’d like to share.

We took the kids to Maple­wood Farm. It is part of Van­cou­ver Parks and the kids absolutely loved it. We’ve taken them before but the last time we went was their first time vis­it­ing out of the str0ller. If you have only one child I would imag­ine that it is easy to let a tod­dler roam around but with two tod­dlers it is impos­si­ble for a sin­gle adult to wran­gle two kids run­ning off in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. I arranged for us to go on a week­end when my hus­band could join us.

It was a rainy Van­cou­ver day so I packed the kids’ rain­suits. We got them bun­dled up and they were happy to be let loose. Once we were inside it was just a mat­ter of fol­low­ing the rain­suited child that was mine to watch. It was so nice to just have to watch one kid! I can­not explain how much energy goes into try­ing to super­vise two kids, but I think it would be sim­i­lar to try­ing to watch two ten­nis matches at the same time.

My hus­band fol­lowed one and I fol­lowed the other. I got to watch my daugh­ter pet a baby goat. It was so sweet to see how gen­tle she was with it. She seemed to under­stand that she needed to be gentle. I saw my son chase ducks and chick­ens that stayed *just* out of his reach. We watched the pigs sleep and sat and pet the enor­mous bunnies.

We let the kids roam. It was bit­ter­sweet, it was awe­some because I knew they were hav­ing a blast and I also felt sad because roam­ing isn’t some­thing they get to do nearly often enough. We made our rounds to say good­bye to the ani­mals and loaded our exhausted kids into the car. It wasn’t long until they were both asleep.

For days after both kids talked about their trip to the farm. There was lots of farm play and both kids asked to go back. Writ­ing this reminds me that I need to make time to take them again. It just goes to show that it isn’t the big things, it is the tiny things that matter.

This post was inspired by a fab­u­lous idea I saw in a tweet from Gwen Bell!

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