Mom Returns to the World

The baby was almost a week old, and Stephie's only venture outside of the house up till now has been yesterday's trip to the pediatrician. Given that she normally walks the dog a mile or two twice a day she was starting to go a little stir-crazy. Plus her nether regions were starting to hurt more from being sat upon all the time than from birthing a baby a few days ago (her words and sentiments, not mine).

Fortunately for us a group of our dog walking friends were going on our not-quite-regular-but-not-rare-either hill climb Friday evening, so we mustered the troops and joined them. I've drawn a map of our route, if you're interested (I just love Google). According to Google Earth it's about a 2.5 mile round trip hike with 600' of elevation gain, although it always feels like more than that to me because almost all of the climbing is concentrated in 3 steep sections. I don't know if this qualifies Steph as a pioneer woman or not, but I was impressed that she was up for it.

Here's a picture of our intrepid band at the beginning of the walk:

Pictured here are Marge and Dusty, Me, Sue, Evan (in stroller), Spencer, Peekay, and Steph. My mom joined us as well, but she was taking the picture, and Spencer and Sue's dog Machie could not be troubled to sit down for a photo (he was too busy peeing in someone's yard off-camera right).

Here's another shot of most of the group, already on the way back down at this point:

and here's the little man himself, sacked out in his stroller:

This was about as awake as he got the whole time, by the way. You can't really tell from the look on his face, but he had a great time.

Most of the walk down Mom and I both kept a hand on the stroller, just to make sure we didn't develop a runaway baby problem:

I did some quick experiments on some of the flatter sections, and I'm pretty sure that in the steep parts if my hands slipped off the stroller handle Evan would be gone before I could do anything about it. I thought he'd probably get a kick out of the ride, but Steph disagreed in such a way that I felt it best not to argue. I think next time we do this walk I'll bring an extra dog leash and use it as a backup tether, just in case.