Fun In The Sun: Enjoying The Great Outdoors
I can’t say I’m an outdoorsy person. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being outdoors. I like to go for walks and work in my flower garden. I especially love it when it’s nice and warm out. Now if it’s cold and snowy then forget about it. I don’t want anything to do with going outside then. The fact that I took Nick out to play in the snow earlier this year shows just how much I love him. Now my brother on the other hand is very outdoorsy. He would be outside all of the time if he could. In fact he loves to point out just how white I look since I don’t go outside much (not this year though).
Nick is like his Uncle David. He loves to be outside. We spend a lot of time outside. Every morning we take a 3-mile walk with the stroller. He loves our walk, and it’s a special bonding time for us. That’s not enough outside time for him though. He constantly wants to go outside and walk around on his own. His new thing is to walk to the doors in the house and point to it to let us know that he wants to go outside. Even when the temperatures had the heat index above 100 the other week Nick wanted to go walk around outside. It was hot, but Nick was having so much fun that he didn’t care (we didn’t play in those kind of temperatures for too long though). When we go outside to play we walk up and down the sidewalk. What Nick likes best though is to touch plants (especially flowers and weeds). He loves to bend over and touch the plants. He could spend hours just walking around and looking and touching plants.
When he gets really fussy I often take him outside because it calms him right down. We recently changed his evening routine because we cut out his bedtime bottle. To calm him down after bath now we go outside and play in his push car. We play for about 30 minutes and then go back inside. By that time he is happy and calm and ready to play a little before bed. Best of all by that point he doesn’t even care about his bottle.
Summer is such a great time to enjoy the outdoors. Everything is green (well it would be if we got some more rain) and in bloom. For Nick it’s a little paradise of exploration. I have a feeling that as Nick gets older he’s going to want to spend more and more time outside.
Outdoors just like his Uncle David.