It can't be good to crave time off so much

I actually have a pretty decent schedule as far as retail pharmacy is concerned. Because I work the one 14 hour day, I'm off two full days during the week. I look forward to Monday and Thursday like nobody's business. Since this past weekend was my turn to work, I didn't get a ton of fun time with the munchkin, so yesterday, we decided to ignore the chores that should get done and have a fun family day.
We started the morning

at a local supermarket/restaurant, Dutchway. They have an awesome breakfast buffet which is normally a good deal (I think it's $6.99 for adults & $0.50/year of age for children), but had a special through July that it was only $4.99 on Mondays. I'm not sure the three of us could go to even McDonald's for breakfast for less than 15 dollars, and we definitely wouldn't have eaten nearly as much or as well.
I'm really bad at showing restraint at buffets, so since we all consumed approximately 80 million calories at breakfast, we then headed to Wolf's Hollow county park for some exercise. We did a combination of the blue and yellow trails, so we're approximating that we did about 2 miles of hiking.
Overall, the terrain isn't too difficult (says the one who didn't carry the toddler), but there are some steep hills

This picture really does not give that hill justice

We saw some wildlife

Big ass spider

Bullfrog

Crazy grasshopper hanging out on my leg

and some beautiful sights

Taken at Lover's Leap, although there isn't much of a leap this far into the summer. Maybe in the winter when all the plants are dead. Yesterday, it was so dense that we could hear the creek, but couldn't see even a glimpse of it

The bullfrog was in those reeds next to the little semi island

Peter was worried about my getting over the fords with dry feet since I only had sneakers and no boots. I reminded him that it's been in the high nineties for a week. The creek was quite low

I love standing on fallen trees over water

The best thing about the hiking trails in this park is that they are all in fairly heavily wooded areas. I didn't even bother with sunscreen, and it was relatively cool. It was a great way to spend a couple of hours together.

She's not in pain, she's saying cheese

Plus, even though Peter carried her for a lot of the hike, Gabriella did walk and run a lot. There is nothing like a tuckered out child for having an easy bedtime.

If it's Tuesday before I can recap, there's a good chance I need a weekend to recover from my weekend

Not a great weekend for the blog, but man did we have a great time!

Friday night, we went to the Brandywine Strawberry Festival, which has little to do with strawberries, other than it takes place during strawberry season and they sell strawberry shortcake. Really, it's just a carnival, but a certain little girl got to meet and hug Elmo, so we can count it as a success.

Saturday, we had the first pizza night of the season with my parents, sister, brother in law and niece. It was a great (and yummy) night, but since I'm a lazy ass, I forgot to take pictures of our masterpieces. Usually when we make pizza in groups, we each design a pie and then share slices. I know we had a red pie with sausage, peppers and onions, another with CSA broccoli, spinach and black olives,  a basil pesto with spinach and black olives, and a pesto with sausage, broccoli and spinach. It's taken a couple of years, but Peter has become a pizza making pro out there. Plus he's pretty cute while doing it.

Sunday was a super long day. We started out heading to my aunt and uncle's house in Baltimore. My cousin Adam recently finished Army training and this was a chance for everyone to see him before he has to report to his new base in Colorado. It was a gorgeous day, and really great to see our family that we do not get to see often enough. From there we drove up to Collingswood to spend the night with Peter's parents in anticipation of him helping his parents get some work done around their house on Monday. Of course Little Miss fell asleep in the car on the ride up from Baltimore and then had no interest in going to sleep at her normal time.  It wouldn't have been a big deal, except she and I had big plans to avoid having to do manual labor on Monday.

Our Arizona cousins were in town and we got to meet up to go to the aquarium! We had such a good time, and with practically no indication that Lil G got quite a bit less sleep than normal. It was wonderful to see Michaela and Zach too, although kids sure do grow a lot when you only see them every year or so.

Unfortunately, it was back to the grind today, although I did make a rather nice meal to use up almost everything left over from last week's CSA share. The only thing we have left in the crisper is a bag of arugula, and it still looks great, so it will not be going to waste. A full recap will have to wait, 14 hour shifts are not fun on a full night's rest, they're really not fun when you start out tired.