Go Green: Life Lessons With Auntie Jen

Holy crap I am the worst. My last post was all "YAY! I am back to consistent blogging!" and here it is 10 days later and this is my first post. Time is like a vacuum sometimes and I can't believe it has been more than a week since I proclaimed my return to serious blogging. ANYWAYS, let's talk long weekends. Canada just had one and you lucky folks in the USA are headed into one. The May long weekend is affectionately called May Two-Four up here, probably because it falls around the 24th of the month but most likely because we like, and consume a lot of, beer (it comes in cases of 24). As a younger lady I would spend my May Two-Four weekend camping with friends. It was fun, it was carefree and I don't remember being bothered by the cooler temperatures and the inevitable rain storm.

Oh how times have changed.

May Two-Four is now spent planting gardens, slugging mulch and swearing at weeds. This year we tried to strike a balance between domestic duties and relaxation. Which of course means that on the last day of the weekend we decided to take 3 kids hiking, because nothing says relaxation like hearing "are we there yet" and "why haven't I caught any fish" every 2 minutes.

I planned this outing ahead of time, stopping short of hopping on Pinterest for ideas like Top 7 Best Games to Play while Hiking and Catfishing Kids into Thinking They are Fishing for Cats. I do however wished I had researched more about geocaching, rather than creating an account 15 minutes before we left and assuming my decades hiking and camping would make me an instant pro. Nothing, makes you feel smarter than failing to solve a geocaching riddle that was made by a 10 year old. Except maybe failing to solve it in front of 2 six year old and a 9 year old. This particular cache (look at me using the lingo) was rated a 1.5 star difficulty, which literally means that it is set for children to figure out. I'm pretty sure I understood the clues and knew the hiding location but my GPS was acting up (I swear!) and as much as we looked through grass and weeds we just couldn't find anything.

We can file this one away under Life Lessons with Auntie Jen and hope that the memories that we made this weekend stay with them. Or at least I can hope they remember the ones that are actually useful like 'how to read trail markers' and 'why not everyone standing beside a river is peeing' and not 'oh yes you did catch some fish, you see reeds are just vegetarian fish'.