Hoping to turn my kids into hikers!

The weather is beautiful today, a quintessential New England mid-autumn day. Blue skies, the foliage a mix of green, yellow, peach, chartreuse, crimson. (It’s probably not quite yet peak, but we forget at peak that the emerald can be a really lovely contrast with the brighter colors, before all the leaves have turned.) Belle and I ran 2.3 miles midmorning, up through the Center, looping around at the Highland Building and back past the school: Running Streak Day 789.

We’re coming up to a 3-day weekend, Columbus Day, and I’m fervently hoping I can get my family outdoors for some kind of organized, dare I say, hike? Hiking is probably way too strong a word for my family’s abilities. I doubt we’ll be tackling Mt. Monadnock any time soon. But I’d settle for a walk on one of the town’s many conservation trails, or even the loop around Walden Pond. Before I had children, I went trail-walking all the time, and I just naturally pictured I’d have kids who bounded through the woods with me. But so far, that hasn’t been the case. When Tim and I were running every day, one of the benefits was simply getting Tim outdoors more often, even if it was for only fifteen or twenty minutes a day. Now, between biking to and from school, playing baseball twice a week, and daily recess time during the week, he still gets a reasonable amount of time outdoors, but it’s a bit vexing to me that neither of the kids likes the idea of just walking in the woods or fields all around us and all throughout this region. Rick has never taken much of an interest – his famous quote about this from long before we were married was that if a recreational sport doesn’t involve fights, finish lines or scores, he’s not interested – so I don’t even expect him to join me, but I no longer have the excuse on the kids’ behalf that they’re too young or too little. They could be fine hikers if they wanted to. The problem is that they don’t want to.

With the forecast fine for this weekend and it being such a beautiful time of year, though, I think I’m going to dig my heels in. They don’t have to conquer any mountain ranges, but surely we can walk the perimeter of our local conservation land or do a mile on the nearest public trail, can’t we? As I always say, writing a goal down takes you at least 60% of the way to making it happen. I sometimes invoke the acronym WIDMIH: Write it down [to] make it happen. I hereby write down that I will get my kids outdoors for an off-road walk lasting at least 20 minutes (hey, might as well start with really really low expectations) this weekend, once during the three days we have off. We’ll see how that resolution plays out.