If you take a close look at the above photo, you’ll notice that only 50% of the children are smiling. The other 50% are scowling for some unknown reason. But now, after the fact, they will both tell you that they had a great walk up to the light house and back.

This is how many (if not most) of our particular family’s outings tend to go. We might have a good start, but sometimes it’s rocky. One or another of us doesn’t want to go. Then things are great for a while…until things aren’t great for someone (or everyone). Sometime in the middle we hear, “aren’t we going home yet?” from one and “I never want to go home” from the other. And more often than not, we have a very pleasant second half of the trip as we wind our way homeward. All in all, our outings skew towards the awesome end of things, with a hefty sprinkling of “why, oh why, did we decide to do this?” added in for good measure.

Even with all of the complaints and the feet dragging and anything else they throw at us, I wouldn’t give up these trips, big and small, for anything. Even on the worst days when they fight me the whole time just to turn around and say how much fun they had.

Day by day, outing by outing, we are all learning to work through our feelings. Tiredness, not getting our way-edness, tempering our glee when we do get our way, keeping on keeping on, and so forth.

And some outings are perfect from the word go. Go figure.