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The Magic of Children
Holiday Stories from the Community
"Why don't you say it anymore?"
"Because I heard you tell Matthew and Maia that you loved them too and I realized that you didn't just love me."
I laughed. "Mommy LOVES me!" was really, "Mommy loves ME!" And, in reality, both are true.
By Renee Vaughn
My boyfriend and I love to mountaineer and rock climb. Since it is nearly impossible (and very costly) to hire a babysitter every time we want to take a trip, we have been trying to find some smaller scale mountains and reserves in our area so we can include my 3 1/2-year-old, Madison Sequoia-Jewel, in this pastime.
Madison enjoys the more active pastimes in life. We decided to see if she shares our love of the outdoors when she was 5 weeks old and took her camping. We live in a year-round warm climate so we were able to take her at a very young age. For most older children and adults this excursion would take around two and a half hours. It took us about six and a half hours. We arrived at Echo Canyon to climb Camelback Mountain armed with camera, water, nuts, apples and of course, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for our picnic at the top, and plastic storage bags to store our trash until we got home.
Madison was able climb small boulders and rocks, threw nuts and bread crumbs to the chipmunks, picked flowers (actually, they were weeds, but she thought they were very pretty) talked with other "trailblazers" we ran into, and was allowed to get as muddy as she wanted (we had a major rain storm two days earlier). We let her decide when to have "snack breaks" and she carried her own miniature Powerpuff Girl backpack and took pictures on the trail.
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