Day 9: Mud Mountain

It was the 4th of July.  Alice was finally feeling better and was now at a fairly normal level of travel mess.  Cam drove Bevin back to Coshocton in the morning, so we went over to explore Mud Mountain.  This was the pile of dirt across the street, behind which cement trucks had been laying a foundation for a new house the day before.  All I said to Alice was that we were going to look at the construction site, and as if she'd been planning such an excursion for days, she quickly grabbed her bag and the scoops she used to play in the bath.  This girl was ready for a pile of dirt.

I am always so happy that Alice is the type of kid who looks at a pile of dirt and sees at least an hour of fun.

She played on this pile (pictured above with Cam's farmhouse in the background) for a long time: scooping dirt, climbing the hill, finding a piece of re-bar to poke things with, digging for "fossils" (any little rock)...  Then we went and visited the neighbor cows, which were quite beautiful despite being covered in flies.  Alice clung tightly, but she didn't hit the ground like last time.  It probably helped that they weren't mooing.

Around lunch time, Cam came back and babysat the kids while Zac and I went to Canal Winchester and met his former roommate, Brian, for lunch.  It was the opposite of dinner with Jason and Maria.  Without any kids anywhere, we were able to have a thorough, sustained conversation for about three hours.  We got back to Cam's around the time the kids woke up from their nap, and we spent the rest of the afternoon playing around the house.

That night was the first night we actually got the kids into bed at a reasonable hour since arriving at Cam's.  They even slept through the neighbor's stellar fireworks, which were quite close and quite noisy.