Finding Adventure at Home
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The great thing about adventure is that you don’t always have to leave home to find it.
This past weekend, we were excited about actually having a weekend at home! We were looking forward to breakfast at our favorite restaurant on Saturday, running the greenway on Sunday, and just generally spending some time recharging and connecting as a family.
As the weekend approached, we decided that it we were well past due on taking Penelope to visit the public library for the first time. The new building at her school has a media center and she has talked about going to the “library” every night and most mornings since she moved into the building. We’ve done lots of trips to bookstores and storytimes, but that’s different from going to the library and going through the process of finding books, checking them out, and later returning them.
I have strong memories of going to the library as a child. I remember the tall stacks in the school library where I attending kindergarten and first grade. Thinking back, the shelves probably weren’t all that tall, but they sure seemed that way when I was five. I also remember the public library behind my dad’s apartment. My sister and I only had to cross one street to get there and we would spend what felt like hours on the beanbags there reading books together. And finally, I remember family trips to the public libraries of the many towns we lived in growing up. We would each browse the section of the library that interested us most and come together to check out our books before heading home or out to dinner on those nights. Book stores are great, but libraries are awesome.
Fortunately, there is a public library very close to our house, so we decided it was time to get library cards and start letting P experience all that the public libraries in Greensboro have to offer.
All told, we spent about an hour hunting for books, selecting the perfect ones for the next few weeks, and reading together on the benches and chairs around the children’s section of the library. Cool fact: our local branch even has a little house in it that holds board books for little hands! Penelope loved sitting in the kid-sized chairs and reading the books on the shelves! For our final selections, we ended up with a couple of classics, a few books about going potty, some books about astronomy (even though she doesn’t get to see the moon and stars most nights, she is obsessed), and one awesome book about animals in Australia. We’ve been reading several of the ones we brought home on repeat since then.
As we were exiting the library, Penelope asked us to “take a walk.” Since this branch of the library is attached to a local park, we went for it. The access to the Evergreen Trail was just across the parking lot, so we held her hand and made our way to the trail after dropping our books off at the car. We’ve let P do some walking/running on some greenways and some well-groomed (flat and level) trails, but this was her first adventure with roots growing on the path and she did awesome. It was so much fun to watch her carefully look for the roots and step over or on them and trying not to lose her footing. She stopped periodically to investigate things on the ground or to look up at trees. When we hike as adults, I think we just get so busy moving, that sometimes we forget to take in the beauty that surrounds us! Seeing this short hike through her eyes was just awesome.
Somewhere near the half mile mark, we came upon the park’s greenway. Knowing it would lead us down to the Price Park Bird and Butterfly Meadow, we decided to leave the trail. We also found a little meandering creek and stopped for a few minutes to throw some rocks. Once on the greenway, we let P exercise her “fast twitch” muscles as she ran alongside her daddy for a few minutes.
The blooms in the meadow are mostly gone this time of year, but we did get to see a few butterflies, a couple of birds and loads of dragonflies. The path is mostly mown grass right through the middle of various plants that came about chest high to me, so it was a little hard for Penelope to see, but she loved this walk just the same. We walked the short half of the loop and then came back to the library road.
At that point, the walk was uphill and alongside the road that leads to the library, so Nathan put her on his shoulders to get back to the car. All told, she walked and ran over half a mile! We are trying hard not to expect too much from her, but as much as we love to exercise outdoors, we are definitely excited by the prospect that in the future she will be able to do so alongside us. It was a great morning!
So how do we keep the adventure coming even when we are sticking around town for the weekend? It’s important to us to have new experiences all the time, so we constantly seek them out. We drive past Price Park almost daily, but the library is tucked away off a side road. We looked it up online before we went because we knew the park was right there too. We have run and walked through it a few times, but never just explored it. Once we saw that the Bird and Butterfly Meadow was there, we definitely felt like that would be something interesting to see as well. Don’t be afraid to have adventures in your own hometown! So often we get stuck in our own rut that we forget there is more to see and do, even in our own backyard!
All told, we spent about two hours between the library and the park, but we crammed a lot into that time and still made it home in time for lunch and naptime. In my mind, that’s a great day!
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