Splashing in the Water and Hiking Around

Lydia is exercising her independence a lot lately. I guess that's the diplomatic way to put it. Here she is after getting dressed up with her "glass slippers" and other dress-up clothes. Tanja wanted to take her picture, and she doesn't like the camera. When Tanja was clicking through the pictures later with her, Lydia saw this one. Her verbatim commentary on it was "She's mad. She tantrum. She screaming. She don't want it." That's our girl...

Over the course of the summer, we have been going to various Maryland State Parks as part of a ParkQuest program.  Basically, you go to the park, complete some activity that they have set up for you, and get a stamp in a booklet that serves as your ParkQuest passport.  The goal is to get families out and acquainted with nature.  Other than the large number of ticks that we have encountered, it has been a fun activity.  On the Fourth of July, we went to Soldiers Delight to learn about old chromium mines.  Here is Karina trying to pan for chromite.

Last week, we did another one at Cunningham Falls.  The quest there was to learn about habitats for animals, and we got to see all kinds of owls, other birds of prey, and turtles.  The main attraction for us, though, was we wanted to go on a little hike to the beautiful waterfall:

I was proud of Karina and how brave she was as we decided to climb up the first big rock toward the source of the falls (we didn't go any higher than that).

We found out that the Cunningham Falls State Park has a very nice beach area along the lake where people could go swimming.  Because we didn't know about it, we didn't bring any swimsuits, but the girls loved going in and splashing around anyway.  Fortunately, we did have spare dry outfits that we could change them into afterwards.

Since that trip, one of Lydia's new catch-phrases is "I splashed in the water."  It's usually followed by either "Want to do it again" or "It was kind of fun".