This week’s great adventure post is a little late to make room for the Keep Britain Breastfeeding Scavenger Hunt. I thought that I’d delay this post, rather than post twice in the same day because I don’t want to bombard you.
The fifth week of this challenge started off as the hardest yet. Even though the skies were blue and the sun was shining, I was more reluctant to leave the house than I was in the torrential downpour of week three.
I think I was just exhausted. Too many late nights during the week meant I just wanted to stay in and hide from the world. But, thanks to the challenge, I forced myself out of the house. Getting a seventeen month old ready to leave the house is hard enough on a good day. There are shoes to find, coats to zip up, coats to zip up, coats to zip up (not a typo - Ebony really loves unzipping things these days) and bags to pack.
We set off in the direction of Etherow Country Park. This beautiful park is only a 20 minute walk from our house, and we hadn’t been down for ages so I decided to force myself to go. It was well worth the effort, because it was a lovely adventure.
As soon as you reach the park, you are greeted by a gaggle of geese and a raft of ducks, desperate to see if you one of the duck-feeding mafia. We weren’t, so they left us to it. We sat and watched the ducks for a while, while Ebony tried to converse with them in a unique mixture of quacks and twit-twoos.
We set off to walk around the lake, but didn’t get very far before we came to a small wooden bridge. The problem with small wooden bridges is that they have gaps between the planks of wood. And the problem with that is that Ebony can spend a scarily long length of time bent over, staring through the cracks to see what lies beneath. So that’s what we did, for no fewer than 10 minutes. The great thing about the great adventure, is that it all happens at Ebony’s pace. We have no destination, and we’re not constricted by time, so she can explore as she wishes.
I actually think she could have stayed staring through the gaps much longer, had a duck not wandered past. Ebony chased after it while telling me to “SHUSH!” Etherow Park is great for nature lovers, there are so many different species of birds and animals to see. We saw quite a few baby ducks swimming with their mothers, and we got really close to a squirrel who seemed unperturbed by Ebony’s deafening shushes.
Ebony really enjoyed looking at the lake, and seeing all of the ducks this week, so it was well worth the trip out. I’m really glad that we went out, because if we weren’t doing this blog challenge we probably would have stayed in that afternoon, and missed out on the sunshine.