2018 Summer Road Trip: Day 3

Day 3 consisted of a trip to the Badlands and a lot of driving.

We found the Badlands interesting, and they reminded us a lot of Goblin Valley here in Utah. We did a few short walks on some paths, and then we did one hike that was a bit longer (3 miles, maybe). It was really hot, but our kids did great.

This was the viewpoint on the longer hike that we did. The boys weren't that close to the edge, but I was really nervous anyway.

I opted to carry Felicia on my back because I knew that when Trixie was ready to give up, I'd rather Eric be the one to carry her. She kept taking his hat off of him, so I ended up wearing two hats for a while. I also found that Felicia would pull my hair, so I wound it up and put it at the top of my head inside my hat. Then she would pull the little baby hairs on my neck. Besides that, she really was a great sport on my back.

Part of the hike involved going up and coming back down this rather steep ladder. Going up was the easy part. Eric didn't think our family could do it, but I really wanted to do at least one decent hike in this park, so I insisted. When it was time to go down, my job wasn't too bad because Felicia was fastened securely to my back, but we knew Trixie couldn't go down this ladder on her own. (She had climbed it pretty well on her own.) Eric successfully brought her down, and the boys came down on their own as well. Worst case scenario, I would have worn Felicia down and then left her at the bottom with Ike. Then I would have taken the Ergo back up to Eric and let him wear Trixie down. (Okay, so a farmer has a sack of grain, a duck, and a dog that he has to get across the river, but his boat only has enough room for...)

The rest of the day was driving, driving, driving. Eric has two iPads for his classroom, and we use them on our trips. We have three kids who can use them, but only two who really understand the concept of set time limits. Consequently, the boys often ended up sharing one of the devices while Trixie got to have the other one with virtually no limits. (It's like the Little House story where Mary and Laura each get a cookie and give half their cookie to Baby Carrie, so the baby ends up with a whole cookie.)

On this particular day, I remember that it took me at least three attempts to pry the iPad out of this sleeping girl's hands so I could let an awake older brother play with it. Every time I'd try, she would wake up and play with it again as if she'd never fallen asleep.

One of the nice things about Felix and Trixie being so near each other in size is that their car seats are actually configured to the same height. That meant we could switch up those two quite frequently, which was necessary since one of them is particularly tyrannical sometimes.