Dad and Archer - One Guess on Who is Doing More of the Work

Last Saturday was our Annual Wyers Family Adventure Day (Planned by Mom).

Things are different this year, obviously, and it took me quite a while to decide what to do for our adventure day of things we haven’t tried before. I procrastinated big time as there were a lot of criteria. It had to be a relatively isolated event as we don’t take the kids far from home these days, crazy-toddler friendly and outdoors, to name a few.

Before we get too far, you can read about last year’s adventure here and our first years of adventure—which started when I was pregnant with Maverick—here.

When I plan our adventure days, I try to make it something that we have not done together as a family. And while we tried to go camping once at Cultus Lake, we have never actually been there! I found a place on the lake that rents pedal boats, and we had our plan! I packed up a picnic bag that we have, scoped out a local place for a treat after our beach adventure and the day was planned.

But, in all honesty, life with kids … I am sure you can see where this is going. We got off to a bit of a grumpy start to our day. It’s been really stressful around here, with the return to school, figuring out child care, visiting family members that don’t *quite* understand our social distancing and safety precautions that we have chosen for our immediate family unit. Not to mention busy jobs, a high-maintenance dog that is recovering from a slight injury to his paws … it really just keeps on coming. But we packed everything up—and by we, I mean me, entirely by myself, which is the main reason that I was grumpy that morning—and drove out to the lake. I was doing my best to have fun, we arrived early and set our things up on the beach for our post-pedal picnic.

Mother nature was kinda sorta on our side; it was sunny, but oh, boy, was it windy! But Brad and I pedalled as hard as we could against the wind and made it across the lake to a private, empty little beach. Despite the fact that Maverick asked to turn around five minutes into our adventure, the minute we stepped onto that beach (and brought out the snacks), our day reset and we ended up having a wonderful time!

We played in the rocks, Archer and Maverick swam, and we explored the little beach that we had all to ourselves. When we got back to return the boat, they told us they were impressed that we got so far. Everyone else that had gone out that morning turned around because of the wind! It makes sense … the only one that pedalled on our way back was Archer, the wind took us the rest of the way! It didn’t really settle down, so once we got the rest of our beach stuff and lunch, we decided to retreat back to the open field to enjoy our picnic instead of staying at the beach. We ate lunch and then played in the grass. It really was a great adventure day, bumps and all.

We went to Huis Shave Ice for our post-adventure treat and try something a little different. Between the four of us, the flavours we tried included cotton candy, strawberry, grape, orange, pink lemonade, root beer, cola and blue raspberry. It was really good! We all came home happy, sugar-filled, possibly a little more tanned and definitely wind-shook. Haha.

I think that part of the reason I had been putting off planning this year is just having been in a funk lately. The things that are usually in our control aren’t really anymore. And while that’s not to say that we wouldn’t have gone to Cultus and had a blast in a pedal-boat, I was hesitant in planning something fun out of spite. At least we still went forward with our day—I don't feel too crazy that way.

The long weekend is ahead of us and we have a few more fun things in store. But it’s really nice to have this one special day each summer to get the kids excited for the unknown and plan something extra special for our family. We tend to fly by the seat of our pants a lot with the kids, so having almost a full day of plans every once in awhile is a pretty nice change. I’m not normally one to plan to skip naps, but I’m proud that I can let that go sometimes. They’re only this young for so long.

Embrace adventure,

Anya