Yosemite's Pretty Neat

We got such a laugh at Yosemite because every time we rolled down the window as we were driving through the park we heard some guy say "It's pretty, huh?" We modern Americans are poetic people as opposed to John Muir's famous lines "There is a great deal of beauty on this planet, but in Yosemite, God gives us a glimpse of Heaven itself" and "No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite."Here is a beautiful picture Dad took from Glacier Point.

And here is the proud Papa with his girls standing in front of Bridalveil Falls. Emily is behind me telling me this is not Bridalveil Falls but a different one that starts with a "c" but Wikipedia says there isn't one that starts with a "c" and Wikipedia is never wrong. We did alot of driving and stopping to sightsee then hopping back in the car to head to the next destination, which is the ideal way to travel all day with a 3 year-old, 2 year-old and an 11 month-old as you all know. They are doing road construction in the park so we had to stop on the road for about 30 minutes at one point. Thankfully we were stopped under beautiful, shady trees by rushing river and our cars were the first two in line. We quickly made friends with the road worker so we could get out and play and get enough advance warning to know when to get back in the car. Anyhow, Jake and Dan were running in the street, we are very responsible parents. There was a hole along the road from some of the construction and Erik had told the boys to be wary of it. He walked off and I was confident my perfect children would never disobey in a situation such as this and turned away. Naturally about 0.2 seconds later the entire Yosemite Valley heard Dan's earpiercing shrieks...from the bottom of the hole. It didn't compute at first, I thought the boys were just beating each other up or something but when I looked where I had seen Daniel standing momentarily before, he was gone. I'm sure everyone in the cars behind us were impressed with our parenting. I've got Libby on my hip and Dan's in a hole screaming and Jake finally had a breakthrough moment and discovered that he does love his brother, well as least when he's in a hole, and he started screaming. What a sight. And being worried and compassionate parents we had Emily take a picture of the hole. And we only considered taking a picture of him in it, you know for posterity, for a moment or two...
After the excitement we traversed the rest of the park to a grove of giant sequoias and I think this is as close as Emily and I will ever get to being called "tree huggers."
One particularly large tree had fallen over and was hollowed out so my boys naturally had to crawl through it as far as they could manage. This was one of those moments as a mom that your instinct is "Dont go in there! There are bugs, and who knows what else. What if you get stuck? What if this big, dead tree finally decides to collapse and you are inside? Etc. Etc." But I've learned in my extensive three and a half years of parenting experience with boys that sometimes they just need to take risks.
Once they couldn't wriggle any deeper in to the tree they climbed out through a hole in the top. This was by far the worst for me as I suddenly see my children being pushed out the top of a huge tree and walking around, ready to fall to their death or another broken leg at any moment. Compounded by the dread of the one mile hike back out of the grove with a mortaly wounded child. Something strange happens to your brain during pregnancy and ridiculous things become extremely dangerous.

To help with perspective, here is Miss Libby beside the tree in which her father and brothers are exploring.

And one last shot of our little crew and a really big tree.