A Sweet Surprise

The boys and I went on a bike ride/nature walk today, exploring a new area.  Gage had been, but I had not, and so we made our way over to a neat little area with grassy fields, a pond, creek, and horses in the distance.  What else could you ask for, right?  It was gorgeous, but I had a hard time completely enjoying our time because a good portion of our outing was spent trying to rein Gage back in.  He had all kinds of ideas of what we should do.  Most of his ideas included maneuvering through heavy brush and steep, jagged hills overlooking the creek.  This would have been fine with me, had we not been toting along Shea (he’s 2).  When Gage gets an idea in his head, it is extremely hard to turn his mind.  He becomes frantic, running around in circles, eyes spinning, trying to find a way to make his idea come to fruition.  In many situations, he figures out a way, but in this one, I was not going to back down.  As a result, what could have been an extremely enjoyable outing  exploring on a Spring day, turned into a half-way pleasant outing in which I came home with a tense neck and the beginning of  a headache.  Later, as I left him here to finish his schoolwork while I ran to Wal-Mart (Jared was here in his office and Shea was napping) I told him to finish his work and completely clean off the table.  This is what I found when I came home:

And the table was cleaned off completely.

For those of you familiar with the area, this is a picture of the shed beside the retreat center on campus.  Gage drew this for his nature notebook after our little outing today.

This kid’s intensity can be wearing, but his sweetness and uniqueness make it all worth it.