Ben showed Brennan some of his favorite spots in the woods around our house...it seemed like they always chose the tougher way to get anywhere, or do anything...
The had a fun time climbing a particularly branch-y pine tree...
It was a little awkward with their heavy winter-clothes and gloves, but the boys did a great job...
After the tree-climbing, we headed back into the deep woods, and deep snow, to check out the cabin in our backwoods...the snow went from pretty shallow (in the picture above)...
...to pretty deep, even deeper than in the picture above...there were some spots on our walk that one of the boys or I would punch through the snow covering a short tree and shoot down a couple of feet...it was sometimes tough climbing out...
We got back to the cabin, and spent a couple of minutes inside, warming up and drying off after our lengthy slog through the snow...the cabin isn't heated, but out of the wind felt warmer...
From the cabin we could see a huge pine-tree that a winter storm had knocked over, and the boys wanted to explore the cavern made by the root-ball...they pretended that they were making a shelter from the winter elements, and talked about finding food (rabbits and pine-needle tea) and making fire (they gathered twigs and picked out a place to make the fire to keep warm)...
Cedar followed us around most of the time that we were out in the woods, checking in with us every couple of minutes no matter how deep into the woods we went, even when the snow was deeper than his legs are long...he's such a great dog...he's sleeping on the couch now, dead to the world...
The boys found another use for their hunting spears on the slog back through the snow towards our house, poking the blisters in the bark of the balsam trees for the wonderfully aromatic sap...it smells wonderful and clean and Adirondack-y...we all ended up with sticky noses from sharing sniffs of the stuff a little too closely...
I showed them the ancient trick of bumping a snow-filled tree to dump the load on unsuspecting innocents (although I did ask them before the first time, I swear)...they couldn't get enough of it, and ended up tackling trees all the way back up to the house, and trying (mostly successfully) to trick me (and each other) into lingering under loaded trees for them to dump on all of us...
When we got back to the house, we had a hot cocoa and popcorn picnic on the tailgate of my Element, and then the boys played on our ginormous snow-plow mountains until Brennan's mother came to pick him up...
It was a super playdate, and we will certainly be seeing Brennan again soon (well...tomorrow for Kindergarten, but you know what I mean)...
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