The Acorn Mile

In laymans terms we refer to this as a hike. If you call crawling at a snails pace down a hill and then carrying a 30 lb toddler back up said hill a hike. But I digress.

One dreary, but warm morning a few months ago we were desperate. Our kid had been locked indoors for the better part of a week and Riley - outdoor time = DRAMA.

We were gearing up to make a trip to Target just to get her out of the house (yes we were that desperate) when I remembered that there is a regional hiking trail on our way to said megamart. I convinced Matt that it would be a great idea to stop and take a quick hike to kill 30-45 minutes and by "kill" I mean prevent myself from spending those same minutes buying things that I don't need at Target. Like another bottle of travel size lotion. There's just something about that travel size toiletry aisle with it's cute miniature bottles and sub dollar prices that gets me excited.

Anyway, we started out on our hike very excited to be trying something new and to finally be outdoors a bit. At first we were moving along at a decent pace and then Riley discovered the acorns.

Not one acorn, or two, but literally hundreds that had fallen off the trees onto the path. After that try as we might she could not be deterred from gasping in surprise when she saw one, exclaiming CORN!, and then throwing it on the path in front of her. Every other step. The. whole. way. down. the. trail.

Eventually we reached the bottom (thankfully the trail was short and downhill) where she discovered that acorns are twice as fun when you can toss them into the Potomac and make a splash. So, we let her splash a hundred -give or take a few- acorns in before we started on our way back to the top.

Now I'm not sure how, but somehow throwing all those acorns directly affected her legs at the precise moment that we started walking back up the hill. She simply could not take another step and sat down in protest. Until she spotted an acorn she had missed on the way down.







It was an acorn miracle! Her little legs worked again and she jumped up and threw that last 'corn with flare. Sadly no sooner than that acorn hit the ground her legs went back to rubber. She could not take one more step. We carried her in shifts up that hill and we haven't walked the acorn mile again since then.

But we have driven past it often, with bags of travel size goodies in the trunk.