Labor Day Weekend Extravaganza

I had one objective this weekend: potty train the three year old. However, it didn't happen. He's not ready yet, and I'm not going to force him lest he will tell his future therapist that I damaged him psychologically by making him wear big boy pants before he was ready. Hopefully, by that time, he'll be potty trained.

After abandoning the potty-training plan, we decided on Saturday to do some hiking. We started out at Uncle Bill's House of Pancakes and High Cholesterol, where we did some carbo-loading for the upcoming adventure. Uncle Bill's is not my favorite, but all the boys LOVE it. So we had a hearty breakfast and headed out to a state park north west of STL.

We did over two miles of hiking, which is a lot, considering Matthew walked with us. The trail was pretty even, the scenery was great and the weather was gorgeous. Here are some pictures we took:







The trail took us to the top of a very high bluff and continued along the edge for about half a mile. The pictures of the boys on the ledge caused me to age at least 5 years. There was also an unfortunate shouting event when I informed Chris and the rest of nature that he was not going to get that close to the edge of the bluff. I won't tell you how that ended, but we returned with everyone intact.

We saw a couple of wild turkeys, one wild turtle, one wild stick bug, one wild toad and heard a couple of wild cows. Alright, the cows probably weren't wild. About 1/4 mile of the trail also allowed riders on horseback, so Matthew became proficient in alerting us to upcoming horse poop.

We had lunch today with Chris's mom and John at California Pizza Kitchen. Overall, the weekend was pretty uneventful and relaxing and maybe by next Labor Day we'll have potty training accomplished.