Searching for the Three Bears

We decided to take another timeout from our urban environment yesterday to hike in the woods. We went to a nature preserve where they had a couple of ponds and a few miles of hiking trails. It was great to be outside! Kaia spent the entire time looking for the home of the three bears (from the Goldilocks story). She was convinced their home was out there and she said they wanted to have us come over for dinner (I'm sure!). When Kaia asked me what her bears would say when they saw us, Asher answered, "Grrrr!" Kaia said, "No, these bears don't say that. These are nice bears."


Here's a small sampling of the things Kaia said along the way:

"I'll really be happy to see the bears, Mom."

"Oh, my heavens! That river is really far down there!"

After falling and scraping her knees: "Prob-ally the bears have band-aids for me." A couple minutes later: "I called the bears and they have Hello Kitty band-aids."

She "called" the bears a few times to ask things like, "How do we get to your house, bears? We can't find it." Here she is calling them:


Kaia carried a little ball of sticky tack throughout the entire hike. She planned to give it to the bears so they could hang pictures on their walls. She also gathered rocks along the way because those were apparently what the bears were planning to have for dinner. I was getting quite worried by the end of the hike about how we would resolve the whole thing since we were just not finding that bear house. Fortunately, Kaia bought into the story that the nature center that was at the beginning (and end) of the hike was the bear's house. She looked in all the windows for the bears, but since we didn't find them she left the rocks and other goodies for their dinner right outside their door:


As it turns out, both Asher and I are complete scaredy cats in the woods! I jumped every time I heard a squirrel rustling the leaves. And Asher was always saying something was in his hair:

A bug flew into my nose within the first 5 minutes of the hike and I kept sneezing the whole time - I'm pretty sure the bug crawled up into my brain because I never saw him reappear. =) But despite that and the utter lack of bears, we had a really wonderful time!