Governor Nelson State Park

I am on a quest to discover new hiking trails near Madison, and I couldn't believe that we had never been to Governor Nelson State Park before.  It's only 15 - 20 minutes away from our house, on the shores of Lake Mendota.  So I dragged everyone out after naptime last Saturday to go exploring.  The girls are much more likely to enjoy a walk if I call it exploring.  They think they are being like Lewis & Clark.  We chose the forest trail, which was about 1.2 miles and went past some Native American mounds.  The mounds were much smaller than those I remember seeing as a child, and very overgrown with grass, trees, and wildflowers.  One was in the shape of a mountain lion, and then there were three conical mounds.  The informational boards indicated that they had no idea why the mounds had been built.  The girls were not very impressed by them (very much like me as a child).  Here is Amelia in front of a conical mound.

I tried to get a photo of them together, but these are the faces I got:

Amelia was MAD that I took a photo of her grumpy face, and she wanted me to delete it and replace it with a photo of her smiling face, but of course I kept them both.

Megan walked next to me and pointed out every single spot that she thought would be a good place for a fairy to live.  There were fallen down rotting logs, tree stumps, and big leaves all over, so it took us quite a while to walk the mile long trail.  Typically Megan and I would fall behind Amelia and Ben, and Megan would take off running to catch up:

About halfway through, Megan started getting tired and whiny, so I gave her my phone and told her she was the official exploration photographer and she should pay special attention to any new kinds of flower she spied.  All of the following photos were taken by Megan:

They especially liked finding the jack-in-the-pulpit flowers, and they always wanted to lift up the top leaf (petal?) to look inside.

Of course Megan had to take a photo of poop, with my foot beside it for a size reference.

And here are some places that she thought fairies would like to live:

After we got done with our hike, we went over to the beach.  It was a little cool, but the girls stuck their feet in the water anyway.

Then they started drawing in the sand.  Amelia started off by writing math problems:

And then she switched to writing nice messages to me.  What a lovely early Mother's Day present!  In the first photo, the heart on the left was drawn by Megan.

I wanted to get a photo of me with all the kids, but of course that didn't happen. However, I did get a few cute ones!