What To Do With A Moaner!

So today we went for a walk.

Normally this wouldn't pose that much of a problem, as we have the GPS preloaded with geocaches to keep the boys entertained on the route. Only this time it didn't.

We have been invited by friends to walk up Pen-y-Ghent in May as a family group, so one of the reasons for the walk was to ensure that the youngest Muddy Monster could cover the distance and we thought we would start with a local 2-3 mile walk that wasn't too arduous to "break him in" gently. He has covered this distance before with no problem and in fact walked further over steeper terrain last weekend!

Elder Muddy Monster was dragged away from his tech to accompany us - although I have no doubt he is quite able to jog up the hill when it comes time and he soon proved why we are called Muddy Monsters by promptly getting mud pretty much everywhere including in his eye, within 5 minutes of hitting up the bridle path.

There is a good reason why we are the Muddy Monsters

So the first mistake I made was letting my lovely husband get Bear ready. This resulted in no hat or gloves to start the walk and as it's only about 4°C then the moaning started pretty much as soon as we left the car. To distract him I put him in charge of the GPS to find the "treasure" boxes and this did help to curb the whining for a while. However after 2 geocaches it started up again, not helped by the fact that the 2 caches we had found were soggy log books in film canisters not capable of holding any swaps. Next we tried distraction with a pine cone but this was too prickly so in the end we settled on a stick with various branches just like big bro was carrying.

Jake demonstrating stick antlers and mud.  

This was working a treat and distracting Bear from his various gripes about being tired/cold/wanting to go home until daddy made the fatal mistake of throwing the stick away. This resulted in us then taking about half an hour to walk across one field due to tears, runny noses, more tears because of the runny nose, an inferior replacement stick and to add insult to injury all the noise attracted the attention of the resident horses in the field and naturally came to investigate who was getting tortured, thus resulting in more offence taken and tears at the fact these equine monsters dare follow us and investigate our rucksack!

Equine Stalkers!

So we can take a couple of lessons from today's disaster of an expedition. Double check your other half has dressed your little muddy monster in suitable attire for a yomp. Don't let them chuck away the stick that said muddy child is happily entertaining himself with. Give them something to do to on the walk and finally if all else fails... Offer to walk ahead and retrieve the car and double back to pick them up to give your ears a rest!