Going Losting XII

For us in one way December brings birthday excitement, and snow and cold weather fun, and wish lists for christmas, and secrets, and cozy family traditions, and general glee. In another way it's actually not particularly a fun time, because Frank has to work a rediculous amount, and we hold our breath the whole month, waiting for the snow on one hand, and on the other, praying that it will hold out until Christmas is over, as it makes the stress level for his job way worse. Anyway, so after Frank got home from work on Saturday, we decided the day had going losting written all over it--the girls had been asking when we were going to be going losting again, and we needed the stress relief of getting out into nature. So, we headed off to explore the Swakane Canyon.

It was a gorgeous day, but also pretty cold out, so we only got out of the car to explore once. Hence we do not have a lot of scenery pictures, which really is a shame, because it was beautiful.

But, we mostly were content to just sort of watch the world go by and appreciate God's beautiful creation together.

We did get out for a few short minutes to smell the pine trees in one little grove we found, and let Callie run... she scaled the side of the canyon a few different times, and generally had a blast running in the snow.

These two collected a few pine cones for decorations, and explored a bit too...

In the picture below, if you look close in front of the tree, you can barely see Callie... we kept losing track of her, but soon figured out that if she is in front of tree bark, we couldn't see her with her brindle coat... so, we took a picture to prove it. When we were looking at dogs before we adopted her, we never would have "chosen" brindle over another shade of dog. Now that we have a brindle dog though, we are so amazed by it. It is beautiful, and truly is amazingly camoflage.

So, after we headed all the way through Swakane Canyon, we popped out in Nahahum Canyon on the other end, in Cashmere. It was a pretty easy little path, very scenic and very pretty. We look forward to taking it again.

We ended our fun time with a trip to the store, where Daddy added to his rifle collection, and the girls discovered that it would be several years before we allowed them to handle guns of any kind, which resulted in a lot of tears. :-) But, Debris found a little pink cooler to spend her birthday money on, and that made her very happy. I tried to talk her out of it, just to make sure she really wanted it, and she would not be swayed. Does a momma's heart good when her babies choose to spend their money on camping supplies. And so we headed home, with Kiki and Debris in the back seat plotting a snow camping trip... we shall see about that. Sounds fun, but also really cold. :-)