Having 4 little kids is tricky, because you pretty much can't do anything. Some days I feel very brave and determined and I think, "This isn't going to stop me!" We will go out and do things and have fun and make memories!" But other days I just say, "Okay! I quit! You guys win!! We will just stay home and be recluses because it is SO much easier to not leave the house!" Because a lot of times we do try, but it just ends up a disaster. It's like 40% good, 40% bad, and 20% awful. So I can never decide if it's worth it.
Here's a couple of examples to illustrate my point.
Valiant Effort #1: The morning after we hiked flattop, we tried to go on a family bike ride. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, and I thought we were ready for that. I would be riding my bike and pulling the trailer, with Madison and Kelsey riding in it. Tyler and Brynlee would be riding their own bikes, and Kenny was going to run so that he could help them as needed. We hadn't ever been on this trail before, but I looked it up online and we thought it was pretty simple. We would park our cars and start at one spot (Goose Lake Park), then go until we got to another fun park that I've been wanting Kenny to see. I guessed that it was around 3 miles. It wasn't quite the "fun family bike ride" I had envisioned so nicely in my mind. Pretty much from the very first 2 minutes of starting out, Kelsey started crying. She really didn't want to ride in that thing. I was hoping she would eventually just fall asleep. She didn't.
Tyler is still fairly new at riding his bike without training wheels, so he can only go one speed: fast. Otherwise he loses his balance and falls off. The problem with that is he also can't start himself again. One of us as to stop and hold the bike steady while he climbs on, then give him a push off to get him going. I can't even count how many times we had to do that.
Brynlee is very good at riding her bike, but she is still little, and it still has training wheels, so she just doesn't go very fast. Oh, and neither of them can do hills very well. Going up is too tough, going down is too scary.
So we have Tyler going super fast, Brynlee going super slow, Kenny and I trying to split the difference, and help out whichever one was struggling at the time. Including the baby girls in the trailer. Kelsey was screaming her head off, and Kenny finally just took her out and held her, while walking next to Brynlee's biking speed.
On top of all this, there were like hundreds (that's a bit of an exaggeration) of trails intersecting with this one, or it would split off into two different ways and we had no idea where to go. Those were not online. We had to back-track a couple times, and I think we looped around a little too far one time too. We had NO idea where we were, or how far away from our destination we were. I kept saying, "we've got to be getting close, we've been going forever!" But when we asked some guy who sounded very confident, he said we were still 2 miles away!! I thought maybe I had just grossly underestimated the distance. So we finally gave up when we reached a part that ran next to a main road. Kenny took my bike and rode back to the cars. He drove back to pick us up, but found out that we were probably 1/8 of a mile away from the park!! I just about died. Of course we were that close when we finally gave up. It wasn't very funny at the time, but now I can laugh about it. So we walked/biked the last few minutes to the park. The kids were thrilled to get to their favorite playground (Valley of the Moon Park), but it didn't last long because they were also super tired and hungry from that taking so much longer than anticipated! (A couple of hours). Maybe next summer we'll try again??
Valiant Effort #2:
Labor Day was the last day of the Alaska State Fair. Everyone was talking about it and saying how much fun they had there, so we wanted to check it out. I also really wanted to see the Bodies Exhibit that they had going on. We drove the 50-55 minutes out to Palmer, and realized we needed more coats. It was cold and very, very windy! Somebody in the parking lot gave us a free adult ticket that they weren't using, and children 6 and under were free! We thought it was so great that we only had to buy one ticket for all of us get in. We quickly went to the indoor part to see all the animals, and to get out of the cold, strong wind.
That was fun for a while, but there are only so many animals to see. So we ventured out to see what else we could find. For our little group, there was not much. Unfortunately for me, the bodies exhibit was closed. We didn't plan very well and only a few dollars in cash with us. But we're also really cheap and don't want to pay $3-6 per ride, per child. So there wasn't much left to do, since we also weren't buying the incredibly overpriced and fatty fair food. Maybe had it been nice weather, we could've lasted longer. But we have no control over that. In fact, I usually feel like I don't have much control over anything :). Madison was the first one to lose her patience. Bryn and Kelsey soon followed. We might be able to handle 1 child missing nap time, but 3 is a little too much. So even though we had only been there about an hour and a half, we called it quits. People just stared at us as we tried to hurry back to our van (which by now is like 20 minutes of speed-walking away) with lots of screaming and crying children who could not be consoled. A few minutes into the car ride, Madi and Kels were out.
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