Hiking

Since Matt has the month off, we have decided to explore our new city.

Today we took our family to one of the many local state parks and went on a hike.

It was a beautiful day, not to hot. As we looked at the trails we thought sure we could do a 2.4 mile hike, no problem, how hard could it be and the boys have a ton of energy they’ll do great.

The first mile was beautiful.
We posed for pictures.
Ike fell, but kept going even with the blood.
We found gun sticks.
We found walking sticks.
We stopped for water breaks.
It was a beautiful hike.
After an hour though, we all started getting hot and bothered.
We ran out of water.
We ran out of energy.
And yet the trail kept going up.
Matt said there is no way I could do justice to how hard this hike ended up being for our little family.
At one time I was carrying two babies, Gracie on the front and Isaac on my back.
Matt wanted to do more, but his leg was going numb (side effect left over from his little back issue in May) and he still carried Adam (Mr Chubby) most of the last part. We said a prayer, because thats what we do when we need help. And boy did we need help! We were all beat and had know clue how much longer we had to hike. After the prayer, we hiked on, through sweat, tears, complaints, and exhaustion.

It turned into a great teaching moment for our boys. We talked about how life is like this, easy at times, hard at times. Sometime you have to focus on just putting one foot in front of the other and keep plowing through. We talked about how sometime life gets hard and it’s nice to have the Savior there to help carry us along when we can’t do it anymore. We talked about how complaining doesn’t help you get to the top of the mountain, it only uses up more of your energy and takes away from what you are trying to do. We talked about the importance of staying on the trail of the hike and on the trail of life that leads us back to our Heavenly Father. We talked about how nice it would be to have an iron rod to hold onto as we walked along the trail. And how the word of God was our iron rod in life that would lead us back to Him. We talked about how thankful we are that we get to go through this hike of life as a family.

As hard as the hike was, I know that we made a wonderful memory, one that we will look back on a laugh one of these days. But mostly I hope my boys will remember that they made it up the mountain, even though it was super hard, that they didn’t give up. I hope they will remember all the wonderful things we talked about and how Heavenly Father will help them do anything, if they ask Him.