Friday, February 6, 2009

Natural Beauty






Oh, how wonderful to see the beautiful sun shining and feel it's warmth on our faces today! After all of the cold weather we have had, I could not have asked for anything better than an afternoon outside with my boys looking at all of the interesting things God has placed before us to admire, study, & enjoy!
Although I do not have alot of land of my own, I am blessed to know others who do and who are gracious enough to share it! So after placing a call to our friends, we all headed out to "go exploring".
We started out at the small pond where we took deep breaths of fresh air and forgot all about the cold weather. We noticed the water levels had dropped since we last visited and we toyed with the idea of kayaking, but we decided against it since we wanted to stay dry. Instead we all agreed to take a hike and see how many signs we could find that would prove to us there had been mammals of some sort around the area. I told the boys to look for clues, such as tufts of hair, half-eaten nuts or pinecones, tracks, or "droppings". Of course they were humored by the last clue and were ready to set off!
Our oldest son, who has camped (and worked) on this land before, wanted to take us on a trail he was familiar with, so we all allowed him to be our guide and followed happily behind him. We spotted alot of natural beauty, such as green moss and wild ferns. We did not initially see any wildlife, but we still enjoyed our trek up to the big pond. There we sat and admired the water and the boys made little "boats" out of tree bark and had fun seeing which ones would float. We did see some geese on the water and found a really neat hollow tree that some animal was probably using for shelter. Nathan was the only one who ended up in the water and he only to his knees. As he was trying to get a stick out of the water, it "pulled him in" (as he says) and he had a short scare. Boy, did he jump out of that water quickly! It was hard not to laugh, but thankfully he did not allow it to ruin his day. I think it helped that Ben offered him his jacket to wrap up in until he was a little drier.
We decided to head back to the smaller pond and as we rounded the corner to it we were greeted by three beautiful horses who had wandered over to munch on the greener grass around the pond. We were so excited to be able to go over and pet them and feed them some grass from our hands. I was a little unnerved at times with all of the children around the horses, but they did a good job of following the instructions I gave them so that noone would get kicked or stepped on.
We spent alot of our time with the horses because they were so gentle and beautiful and we could not pull ourselves away to go on. However, we did notice that the sun was lowering and we knew our time was getting short. Lately, I have been taking some time to admire the silouettes of the trees in the sunrise/sunset, so I took a couple of pictures and pointed this out to the boys. I'm not sure that they caught my enthusiasm, but one day they may.
Finally, it was time to go home, but much to our delight we were given one more gift of beauty as we headed down the driveway...deer in the pastures peacefully grazing. We could not have asked for anything more! How refreshed we were when we got back home and how much more we admire the Creation around us!

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