On July 3rd we decided to get out of town and go visit the mountain that we saw every time we headed south on I-5, Mt. Rainier. It was a three hour drive there, and really we should've planned ahead and stayed over night so that we could see more of the park, but it was a fun daytrip. The park and mountain were beautiful, just like the rest of western Washington. Ignore Leona's grumpy face in the photos. She really had a great time, she just wanted to be grumpy in the photos, so she was.
We had fun going on a couple short hikes. The wildflowers were just starting to blossom as the snow melted. The kids really enjoyed the snowy part of the park. There was still enough snow in parts of the park that there were small skiing trails (mostly cross country skiing with a small bunny hill) marked off so we steered clear of the skiers. The kids were intent on climbing this one pile of snow even though they didn't have the right clothes for it. Clara's hands got so cold that I thought she was going to throw up (photo below😆) but they all persevered and summited their personal mini mountain.
On our last hike of the day Timothy was beyond done and screamed unless I was singing. I'm not sure which would've disturbed the other hikers' nature experience less, hearing a shrieking toddler or me singing, but I sang the whole way back out of the trail. The girls would shout out a song and I'd sing as many verses as I knew, Timothy would start to scream, and then we'd repeat the whole circus.
