Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

Hi, this is Laura, happy to finally make a blog post..... As soon as Lucy was born, Jacky was set on planning to come see her!  I was so touched that she took vacation days and time away from her awesome family to travel all the way from Ontario to meet Lucy and spend time with us.  Jacky and I got a good combination of family time with Johnny and girl time with the two of us and Lucy.   I drove up Thursday morning to pick Jacky up at the St. Louis airport and Lucy did well in the car most of the way.  She is definitely getting more aware of her surroundings, so that means she now has the capacity to get bored and also is not lulled to sleep as well by the car as she once was.  But, getting aware of her surroundings means she can connect with people and boy does she love Jacky!  The last 30 minutes of the drive to the airport were rough, as Lucy had had enough and was hungry, so first stop after picking Jacky up was the cell phone lot at the a...

I was just cleaning up some old storage and came across this album from before we got the new cameras and started this blog, so I figured I'd post it up.  We were invited by Laura's friend Eric (aka Spider) to go on a nice hike to Hutchins Creek in the Shawnee National Forest.  At that point, we hadn't really done much hiking in the Shawnee and really weren't in hiking shape.  So needless to say, the hike kicked our butts while Eric just hiked along with ease.  It was about 2-2.5 miles downhill through some nice forest and then the same back up to the Godwin east trailhead.  The creek was beautiful and we did have some luck rockhounding.  That's the story as I remember it; here are the pictures from down by the creek...

Micah invited Lucy and I to join him and Steven for a hike to Panther's Den, which is one of the closer hikes to home.  During my last trip to Bulge Hole with Laura and Lucy prior to the stay-at-home order (post in the works), I tried to use the our new Olympus point-and-shoot (upgraded from TG-5 to TG-6) for some wildflower closeups, with mixed success. I had since done some reading and adjusting of settings in the camera and was excited to get out and see if I could improve. It was forecasted to get up to near 80 degrees, which was a sharp contrast to the last hike when it was substantially cooler.  Using the Ergo in the winter, I had learned it would make Lucy and I hot, so we both wore short sleeves for the trip.  I also had to plan on how to keep the milk cool, and Laura and I discussed a few solutions and came up with what we thought would be a winner.  We forgot one crucial step though... The hike started out well.  Both parties arrived in our sepa...

Micah and I were off on another hike with Lucy to give Laura a baby-free work day.  This time, I was eager to go to Cane Branch Falls in the Burden Falls Wilderness.  I had planned to take portraits of Laura there last year as part of her photo sessions, but we ran out of time.  I wanted to go visit it in the spring when there would surely be some water running. We figured that the falls would be a quick hike as it wasn't far from the road and it was a small waterfall that wouldn't give us too many angles to photograph.  Honestly, we didn't have any high expectations for the hike and had planned to drive to some other waterfalls to fill the day.  We left our lunches in the truck and headed north on the trail for a while.  We were wrapped up in conversation and passed the turn off the trail to do down into the rocky glade, so decided to bushwhack over a hill to get there.  We ended up at the top of the glade on the north side but were able to find ...