Park Time Fun

Today the kids were off from school and Pete decided to take the day off too! So, we were able to do something fun together as a family, which was so nice. The day couldn't have been more perfect - 70 and sunny. But, apparently the bugs thought so too, so our day was spent with thousands of ladybugs and mosquitoes. Doh! But, Livie loves ladybugs, so she was in heaven. :-) We went south of town to Illini State Park, which is a really nice park. We decided to go looking for treasures. We wanted the kids to find cool leaves, pine cones, berries - anything fun that they'd want to collect. We took a big basket for the kids to put their finds in. But first they played for a bit on the playground they had there. After they played on that gym for a short bit, they went on to find lots of cool stuff. The leaves haven't all turned yet, so we didn't find a whole lot of colors on the ground, but Pete's tall enough, that he was able to pick a few off the trees for our collection. :-) The kids even found a matchbox car in the middle of a field, so that too was thrown in the basket. We walked down by the river and found some sticks and saw some mold on a tree that they thought was awesome! Then after a short time of getting eaten by mosquitoes, we decided to head back up again. We had finished up our collecting so, we decided to drive to other areas of the park. It's a pretty long park and we were hoping to find some pretty trees along the way. The leaves hadn't changed much on the other side either, but we went all the way to the end of the park where the Marseilles Lock System is for the barges. So, we took the kids out and showed that to them. The cool part was just as we got there a barge pulled up and was going to be taken into the lock! So, we stayed and watched as the barge was pushed into the lock by the tugboat and watched the doors close and the water rise. It was really fun to watch! The kids had never seen that before and I had never seen this one. Heck, in 8 years of living here, I didn't even know there WAS one! Learn something new every day, don't I? So, we stuck around and watched the water rise and the doors open on the other side, so the barge could continue on. It was a fun day to just spend together and it was a much needed quiet moment (well, as quiet as it can be with 3 silly kids!) for me. I loved it!

You'll notice in the pictures that Livie wore her crown. Her princess costume for halloween arrived in the mail today and she hasn't taken it off since! Guess even princesses can look for treasures in the woods. ;-)

***The pictures above were not just taken by me. Madie and Noah tried their hand at picture taking too and did a pretty good job, I must say. They took all the family shots (you'll notice that one of them is missing in each) and Noah took the one of Pete and Madie and Madie took the one of Pete and Noah and Livie and I as well. Oh, and she took the picture of Noah on the tree. They just loved taking the camera out. Hmmm.... maybe a camera is in their christmas future! ;-)