The Kamienski's One Year Old Driven Memorial Day Weekend

It isn't like I didn't believe people when they said "one year olds have a lot of energy". If I had any doubt about the energy of a one year old Memorial Day Weekend cemented the thought in my mind forever. It is truly amazing how much energy one little boy can have. At 8 every night this weekend, Wally and I thought "he has to be tired" but he wasn't. The day this photo was taken Ben, Wally and I went on the first family hike (I use the term hike very loosely because at one point we were "hiking" through a parking lot). Our adventure began first trying to find a carrier for Benjamin. We have a Baby Bjorn but Ben grew out of that contraption awhile ago. We were looking for a "serious" carrier. We first went to Dick's Sporting Goods and found out these things aren't cheap at $200 I hoped we would be hiking quite a bit. Wally strapped Benjamin in and walked around the store seeing if he liked the feel of the thing. I just thought "that looks heavy and I hope Wally wants to carry him all the time in it." We decided to look in Babies R Us since we had to go there anyway and since we had a 10% off coupon. We ended up finding the exact same carrier there (A Kelty Kids Version 3.0 - or something like that) but it wasn't in the color Wally wanted so he had the guy climb up and check out all the boxes to see if they had a color he liked. At one point, Wally was considering going back to Dick's to spend more money so he could get a grey one - I said "no". It is now about 11:30 and no hiking has started except if you consider the hiking around the stores we did. Benjamin in Babies R Us insists on eating Cheerios himself and whenever I try to take the container away from him he screams so we think he is happy eating his Cheerios and he isn't the first kid to drop Cheerios all over Babies R Us. We did finally go on a hike it was 1 mile to The Arboretum through the woods and up a hill and along a stream into a beautiful field. Benjamin loved it and his finger was pointing everywhere making sure we saw all the wonderful sights as well. Once we got to the Arboretum, Benjamin got out of his carrier and was free to explore the world. On his exploration, that is where we captured the great picture above. He decided to get a closer look at the flowers growing - it was one of the those perfect moments that you were lucky enough to capture on film. He also checked out the fountains on the grounds and threw a number of sticks in the fountain and was very proud of himself. He also tried to run away from us down a path laughing his head off but Wally was too quick for him and that made him laugh even more. One the way back to our car (a mile away), Benjamin got tired of the carrier and let us know about it. We walked pretty quickly back and were pretty exhausted once we got the car. Once back in his car seat, I think we were only in reverse and Benjamin was sound asleep - something Wally and I wish we were at that time. But no matter how exhausted, we were this weekend and it was the best exhaustion I have ever felt.