Thursday, August 6, 2009

Summer Hike

So today we went on a hike that I have been wanting to do ever since I bought my first hiking guide for the Lac Leman region. It is a hike through the forest of Jussy, briefly crossing the border with France, and then returning to Switzerland and forests once more. I have to write this post now before the rose-coloured glasses of time kick in.

Ach! Bad idea. OK. We started with over an hour of tram and bus to get there. Not such a big deal especially since the boys love riding public transit. The problem was that we couldn't get started on the hike until after 11, and the sun was already high in the sky. I had tied David to me for the hike, and his chubby little arms and legs were about all you could see of the little guy. Unfortunately, that meant that while the wrap was covering his and my bodies and causing us both to sweat like animals, his little appendages were unprotected from the sun. I spent the entire hike trying to position my own sunhat to best provide coverage to the baby. I was terrified that I was going to give a 2 month old baby a sunburn. This leads to my third complaint. For a hike through forests, there was suprisingly little shade. The heat and the stress of protecting the baby did not give me much patience to deal with the final little point. The estimated time for the hike was 2.5 hours. After deducting time for lunch and nursing, we did the hike in 4.5 hours. Michael started off slow and only got slower. He started getting very needy half way through and wanted to hold my hand all the time. I tried very hard to be the good mom and help him along. I was hot and tired and had a fussy baby strapped to me that I was worried about getting too much sun and anchored to a slow-moving little boy when I really just wanted to run from shady retreat to shady retreat.

Okay, on the plus side. I finally got to do the hike I had been wanting to do for years. We were out of the house ALL day on a beautiful, if a little too hot, day. Lucas was suprisingly great. Sure he complained and kept asking "How much longer?" but he also kept walking and keeping up pretty mucht he whole day. The boys got lots of excercise. I got lots of excercise. Baby David has had his first hike and the wrap worked great. My back started to ache only near the end of having carried him for the better part of 7 hours (I did have a reprieve during lunch and Chris carried him for about an hour after that). I am positive that after a couple days have passed we will look fondly at all the photos we took (I will add some at a later date, once they are off the camera). I am sure by morning the boys will have changed from complaining about "How much longer?" to "When can we do another hike?"

I've already picked the next one I want to do...