Last Sunday, our family took a drive through the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
These were the grown-ups.
We were quite brave, taking a car full of wild little Lewtons into a park with wild animals. Or maybe we were well-armed. In any case, Sammy took this picture before we embarked on our drive. Just before that, we spent a few minutes walking through the park station, looking at pictures, eating complimentary popcorn, and telling the kids "no" when they asked if we would buy souvenirs.
It was Presidents' Day weekend. In honor of the day, there was a multiple choice quiz with about ten questions asking presidential trivia. You could complete the quiz and hand it in for a prize. In our family, Tom is the resident president-expert. Every kid is probably an expert on something. For Tom, it's presidential history. He can give you the names of all of the presidents in order. Usually, you can give him a year and he can tell you who was president at that time. He loves to learn about them.
He was working on the quiz and his dad "helped" him with one of the questions Tom wasn't sure about...which later was the only one Tom did not get right! (Truthfully, presidential history has always been Marcus' bag, but I guess it was a tricky question.) =)
Tom still walked away with a nice little cutout of Teddy Roosevelt. (A no-cost souvenir!)
Three wild Lewtons: Tom, Karis and Sam.
Marcus and Sam, who can never find two of his own mittens, so he borrows Karis' instead, pink and all.
Karis turns three in a few weeks.
We took a mini-hike up a miniature butte. The boys were not at all afraid of any of the edges.
Tom wriggled his way through a rock.
Whew! We all made it safely down to the end of the trail.
We saw very little wildlife outside of our own vehicle. Just these buffalo, along with the obligatory prairie dogs.
But we saw beautiful sights on that strangely warm, 50-degree February day. A drive through the park is ia good reminder of the uniqueness of creation. I'm not one to call the badlands beautiful, maybe because beautiful to me is still the endless of horizon of the trusty flat, flat land I grew up around. Roosevelt referred to the "immensity and mystery" of it all.
In the end, with all of the wild Lewtons in the car and accounted for, we exited the park. I wonder if Karis learned any naughty tricks from watching the wayward prairie dogs...
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