Elora has been asking to go to Zion National Park, so on Labor Day we headed over to our favorite place and went off to look for frogs in the canyon.
Elora has gotten right into the hiking groove, and climbs all over the rocks. Oliver is kind of a goober, and likes to climb, but doesn’t really pay attention to where he is going, which makes it a little nerve-wracking to watch him hike around. This is right before he fell over and bonked himself on the rocks…
Here is Elora with a baby frog! Usually the frogs are big by now, but there has been tons of water and the spring was really cold, so where we usually find frogs, we found tons of tadpoles and two baby frogs. Elora as you can see, was thrilled to catch and hold frogs. She is much more careful now then when we used to do this when she was two.
Oliver was excited to see the frogs, and to let them sit on his pants and to watch them hop…
But this expression after Elora handed him a frog indicates how he feels about holding frogs in his hands! He warmed up to the idea a little after we had been there awhile.
Marion LOVED holding the frog, and was really fascinated by the whole experience. She kept trying to grab the frog. She’s pretty quick too, so we had to keep a close eye on her or she would try to grab and squeeze the poor little guy. When Elora put him back in the pond he swam to the far edge…
Marion was excited to have a new place to crawl around, and proceeded to try and climb up the rocks. She actually is a pretty good climber. We’ll have to watch out at home, I can’t imagine the stairs will be much of a challenge after her rock climbing adventure in Zion.
We had a picnic with the kids, and then – swordfighting. Of course.
Marion wanted to join in the swordfighting action, so Elora handed her a stick, and Chris proceeded to teach her how to whack his stick. She’s a natural.
Elora likes to give the baby things she finds interesting. On this trip it was pine cones. She kept giving them to Marion, who was not really interested and kept going back for the sticks.
More swordfighting… Eventually they moved on to hide and go seek. A fun game when you get to climb through cactus and tumbleweed to find people.
On the way home we saw some Bighorn Mountain Sheep. This is only about a quarter of the herd that we saw. The kids were so excited, and I was quite surprised to see so many this close to the road. Usually they are hard to find during the day, but lately we have been seeing them more frequently. We hope to spend some more time hiking in the coming weeks before it gets cold and snowy!
