Adventure #1

     Ok sooooo, about a year and a half ago, I (Aaron) committed to being a presence on this blog. It seems I have not quite succeeded at showing up, virtually speaking. I'm here now to appease those who have been waiting to hear from the masculine namesake of this wonderful little blog... Oh and I brought a super cool friend!

     I made a goal this year to take Eli on one adventure a month. We almost didn't make January because there was a forecast of snow on Saturday. If we didn't go on Saturday, I wouldn't really have had another chance in January since Amanda and Eli are headed to Kansas this week. I had planned on a five mile hike at Cedarville State Forest, but with snow and lower than expected temperatures forecasted I decided to put my overlyambitiousfathertothepointofputtingmykidindanger* side away and just have two adventures in February. We settled on a much needed lazy day at home.

     We got up early (for a Saturday) because I had some business to take care of at the church. When I got back, we popped in a movie to watch. The movie was "Bride Wars", so Eli and I, manly men that we are, weren't that interested.** Fortunately, in anticipation of not having an adventure, I had spread some bird seed outside of the front window to bring nature to us. We saw three male black-eyed junkos (aka snow birds), a bunch of house sparrows, and our yellow-belly sap sucker (that's a woodpecker) even came to visit!

     Once that was over, the weather was still crummy and we had done all our chores the day before, so we called it a family movie day and popped in another fancy-dancy moving picture, this time "27 Dresses".*** When that was over, we looked outside again and suddenly the sky was clear! I went outside to check the temperature, and it wasn't even that cold, but it was late enough that I thought it might take too long to get ready and get to Cedarville, so once again I came to terms with an adventure-free month. 

     At this point Amanda had some visits to make to some of the folks from church, and Eli and I opted to accompany her. We're kind of like her really buff and handsome body guard escorts when she has to run errands. I loaded up the carrier, just in case the weather held out. I thought we might try to make it to Cosca Regional Park for a quick jaunt around the pond while Amanda was visiting her friend.  

     On our way there, we discovered that Henson Creek Trail runs right by where we were going. We dropped Amanda off and hit the trail. Here's how it went:

     We started off by seeing this really cool bird in a little drainage ditch that led to the creek. We later identified it as a killdeer. Sorry this picture is terrible, but take a look anyway. On our way back we actually saw a second killdeer. 

     After we saw the killdeer, we saw three real deer! Look! They even posed so nicely for our photo shoot.

     We saw three male and two female cardinals. Here are a couple of them.

     We even tracked a little fox or something. (Probably just a cat or something less wild than a fox, but I'm practicing spinning believable little fantasies for my son like my dad used to always tell me. Once he had us believing we were of Hispanic decent...)

     We couldn't go too far since I knew Amanda could call at any minute saying she was done, so we kind of just wandered down to the creek to play around.

     Eli and I are so happy that the weather cleared up and we were able to have our first adventure after all. On our way back to the car we talked about the creation of the world and how we are responsible for taking care of the earth and all the things that make it so beautiful. This was one of the best times I've had as a father. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to keep it to just twelve adventures this year...

*I couldn't think of a word for why I wanted to go despite better judgement, so I made a word out of all the words that I think my subconscious mind was screaming at the more primitive portion of my mind that was making the decisions when I started planning this whole thing.

**Just kidding. We took it as an opportunity to take note of cute hair styles to suggest to Amanda as she tries to decide what to do with her luscious locks... And... I may have enjoyed the movie more than I expected to enjoy it...

***Eli and I were just as disinterested in this one as the last one... Kidding  again. I think I've seen this one at least a billion times with Amanda, and I do believe I surprised her by knowing more about it than  she expected me to know about it.