Birdie Back Pack
Saturday was extremely nice here in NE Ohio by the standards of any month, let alone March, so M and I took Birdie out to do some hiking. We've done some of this with her before, mostly in the Rocky River Metroparks on trails that the stroller can easily handle. This gave us our first chance to use the hiking backpack that we got from M's sister when she was done with it.
First, we headed out to Old Woman Creek. The trails here are relatively short and quite a few of them have nice wooden stairs, so it was a good testing ground for the backpack. Once we got it adjusted properly, Birdie had a fine time as she bounced around first on my back and then (mostly) on my back. She made happy babbling noises pretty much the entire time. More precisely, she has a set of noises that M calls the monkey noises because they sound sort of monkeyish, and those are the noises she made the whole time. She also had fun trying to remove my hiking hat as we went along.
From there, we went to the beach access down the road. We gave her a bottle and then walked up and down the beach where the estuary hits Lake Erie. There was still a lot of ice floating in the water here, and the water was moving quickly. It was pretty.
We then headed back east toward home with a step at French Creek Reservation in the Lorain County Metro Parks. Neither M nor I had ever been there before. The trails were very wide and stroller friendly, so we took them around the creek, past the nature center, over a couple of bridges and up to a ridge line. We didn't hit all of the trails, but we saw more than enough to want to come back one day.
Birdie held up fine over approximately 4.5 miles of walking. Her sleep pattern was slightly disturbed - she had two short naps in the car instead of one long nap in the middle of the day, but she conked out right on schedule and work up more or less as usual on Sunday morning.
First, we headed out to Old Woman Creek. The trails here are relatively short and quite a few of them have nice wooden stairs, so it was a good testing ground for the backpack. Once we got it adjusted properly, Birdie had a fine time as she bounced around first on my back and then (mostly) on my back. She made happy babbling noises pretty much the entire time. More precisely, she has a set of noises that M calls the monkey noises because they sound sort of monkeyish, and those are the noises she made the whole time. She also had fun trying to remove my hiking hat as we went along.
From there, we went to the beach access down the road. We gave her a bottle and then walked up and down the beach where the estuary hits Lake Erie. There was still a lot of ice floating in the water here, and the water was moving quickly. It was pretty.
We then headed back east toward home with a step at French Creek Reservation in the Lorain County Metro Parks. Neither M nor I had ever been there before. The trails were very wide and stroller friendly, so we took them around the creek, past the nature center, over a couple of bridges and up to a ridge line. We didn't hit all of the trails, but we saw more than enough to want to come back one day.
Birdie held up fine over approximately 4.5 miles of walking. Her sleep pattern was slightly disturbed - she had two short naps in the car instead of one long nap in the middle of the day, but she conked out right on schedule and work up more or less as usual on Sunday morning.