Great Falls

We went to DC this weekend to do a little bit of shopping and stopped at Great Falls. Here's a picture of us at the same place from 2007. Strawberry was making me nervous. My babies are so big now!

I really need to update the pictures of the kids we have on the wall because they are 2 or 3 years old and I thought that this would be a good place for it so I had a little photo session. However, my younger two girls are such a pain in the butt to photograph. I didn't have my nice camera and this one is a little slower so they had to actually look at me and smile for 5 seconds. Thank goodness for mature 9-olds. I think I'm going to have a redo though. Poor Mango was so sweaty.

I'm trying to teach Apple to ask permission before she runs off and does something crazy because she is at an age where she is big enough to do lots of things, but not quite old enough to exercise caution. She's definitely a wild little thing and Mango tends to be her shadow and copy everything she does. This excursion really highlighted our need to work on that because I felt like the whole time, I was yelling at Apple to stop whatever she was doing. And, of course, that makes her want to do it more. I want her to be able to go free and explore, but I don't trust her enough to keep herself safe and I over-correct and restrict her from things that are actually fine. And then of course Strawberry is 3 years older and I can trust her more--which Apple finds completely unfair. But Mango also thinks she can do anything Strawberry can do. It gets very complicated.

We stopped at a little creek on the way back to the car so they could all get their need to mess with rocks and water out of their systems. Strawberry was very mad at me because I let her wear a dress that was completely inappropriate for playing in a creek because it was too long. Apple was mad at me for taking too many pictures. Sigh. Parenting is the worst! But i love it so much!