NSC 2019 - Game 1

We went to our first Nashville Soccer Club game of the season on Friday night.  We have season tickets again this year and the same seats.

On Friday, NSC played MLS team New York City FC in a pre-season friendly.  Just like the first game last season, it was VERY WET.  It rained the entire game (the boys actually had the day off of school because of all the rain we were getting and the potential for flash flooding).

Carter and Rylan wanted to start the game sitting in our actual seats in the rain. 

We made it about 30 minutes before I suggested we move up to where Brian and Gray were sitting under the overhang several rows up.  It didn't take much convincing.

It was still cold but so much better out of the rain!

NSC ended up losing 2-0 but they had some good opportunities.  The majority of the players who had playing time are back from last season.  Plus we got to see some of the new guys and are excited for the season!

School Valentines

Here is what the boys did for Valentine's Day at school this year.  Rylan and Gray repeated ones they've done before (Rylan has a little different saying though).

Gray had a Valentine's Day party at school that the parents got to attend.  He talks about the girls in his class way more than the boys.  I think he really likes their calmness compared to the crazy boys in his class (he gets enough of that at home).  Here he is with his currently "love", Aubrey.

Clay

Carter and Rylan worked with clay at art class on Friday.  Carter made this creation at the end and wanted me to take some pictures of it.

The Crag

Yesterday was cold and wet so I took Carter and Rylan to The Crag to try out rock climbing.  I had gotten a Groupon so it was reasonably priced (and they have 4 more visits to use).  This was my first time at a climbing gym since college!  If I weren't so cheap, I would have climbed too using the self-belays but $22 for me to only do 5 routes was too much.

Because it was their first time, they just did the self-belays.  That meant they could both climb at the same time instead of my having to belay one at a time.  There were only five self belays but it was enough for their first time.

They both did great!  Neither was scared of the height and they both got better over the hour and a half we were there.  And because we were there right when it opened, we had the place to ourselves (there were only a couple of guys in the bouldering area).

They were both completely worn out by the end.

Here are a couple of videos:

Long Hunter State Park Hike

We took the boys hiking a couple of weekends ago at Long Hunter State Park since we had a warm day for February and late basketball practices.  Long Hunter is a small park along the eastern shores of Percy Priest Lake in Nashville.  We did the Day Loop Trail which we also did the the big boys back in 2011.

Gray is starting to get a little big for the backpack but it beats carrying him on my hip or shoulders when he gets tired.  He was trying to walk around at the trailhead while it the pack :)

Gray did use the pack but he also ended up hiking quite a bit.

We took a side trail to get a better look at the lake early on and decided to stay off the trail and on the rocks for about a mile.  The lake is low for the winter so it was fun to explore this area that is normally under water.

 

After returning to the trail and hiking for a bit, we came to the bluff section.  There are some great views and fun ledges to hang out on my here.

Hopefully we get some more warm days when we don't have spring sports that take over our weekends to get in a few more hikes!

Fire Hydrant

Fire Hydrant by Rylan ...

Travelbugs

Brian is working all weekend so to get the (loud) kiddos out of the house, we did a little geocaching this morning.  We haven't placed our own cache yet but we got a few travel bugs and placed them in caches we found today.

The first one we named "NCSU is #1".  We attached the bug to a NC State jersey keychain.

We placed it in a geocache we found in Liberty Park.

The second travel bug we named "Tuffy".

We placed it in this really cool cache we found in Cool Springs.  We had to figure out how to open the cache and luckily Rylan figured it out right away!

Letterbox Carves

Carter and Rylan carved their first letterbox stamps (as well as a hitchhiker stamp which is a stamp that travels from letterbox to letterbox). 

Here's Rylan's.  He did the state of Tennessee (we wanted something simple for the first carve).  Then he did a dove for the hitchhiker.  We also made first finder cards for the first person that finds the box to keep.

Here's Carter's.  He did the state of North Carolina and a flamingo for this hitchhiker.

We decided to place both letterboxes in Crockett Park since there is only one other box there.  It's a pretty busy park so searched the edges of the park to find places that we thought the boxes would be undisturbed by non-letterboxers.  It took awhile yesterday but we finally found two spots on opposite ends of the park.

Rylan's is in the stump at the base of this tree.  Here is the clue for his.

Carter's is inside this tree with a bunch of baseballs and lacrosse balls we found in the woods here.  Here is the clue for his.

Now the boys are impatiently waiting for someone to find them and log them!

More Geocaching

We're still finding caches!  We are up to 22 now.  This was a hard one that took us about 15 minutes of searching under a muddy bridge!

We found a travel bug the other day which we need to place in another cache (we are waiting until we are out of town to place it).

We also finished the City of Brentwood History series.  We had to do 9 multicaches in 9 parks in the city of Brentwood.  When we finished we turned in our secret code at the Brentwood Library and the kids each got one of these pathtags.  They are pretty cool!

Chattanooga

The weekend before school started we took our only vacation of the summer (and it was for just one night away).  Brian was working on getting a soccer coaching license and one of the classes he needed to take was being offered in Chattanooga.  So we decided to make a weekend out of it and all go down to Chattanooga.

The class was on Saturday afternoon so we drove down in the morning, had lunch, and then Brian dropped the boys and me off at the Tennessee Aquarium.  We haven't been to the aquarium since we lived in Knoxville so this was Gray's first time there.  It wasn't too crowded and we got to spend lots of time at our favorite exhibits.

We spent a long time watching the penguins swim.

Petting a shark!

I agreed to souvenirs ...

And I got a few nice pictures.  The cuttlefish were awesome!

So were the jellyfish.

When we were done in the aquarium we ran into friends who were also visiting the aquarium from Franklin!  We let the boys play in the water outside of the aquarium (somehow no one got soaked!).

When our friends had to go, we walked over to Rita's for some Italian Ice while we waited for Brian to come get us.

After Brian picked us up, we went out to dinner.  We had barbecue and then enjoyed a band playing outside the restaurant before heading to our hotel for the night.

On Sunday we went hiking.  Our first stop was to Glen Falls on Lookout Mountain.  This is an easy hike (only about 1/2 mile) but a fun one for the kids because they got to play in the water (we brought along Chacos).

 The falls aren't the most impressive we've seen but they are fun because you can walk in the shallow water below them.

The boys continued on the trail a little further and ended up even with the top of the falls (I'm still at the base).

We had to go through a tunnel created by some fallen rock.

Then we explored the creek bed above the falls.  It was pretty dry but we could see where more waterfalls would feed the creek after more rain.

Our next stop was Lula Lake.  This area is only open a couple days a month and we happened to be in Chattanooga on one of those days.  The gates opened at noon so we picked up some lunch and waited at the gates for them to open.

I don't remember how many miles we hiked that afternoon, but it was more than we expected.  The parking area had moved so we had to do a lot more hiking on the road to the trailhead than we'd anticipated.  If you look at the map, we parked at the word "Entrance".  Then we hiked the gravel road to the Middle Trail.  This was the view from the top of the mountain were the Middle Trail meets the Bluff Trail.

We continued on the Bluff Trail to the High Adventure Trail.

There were a couple of ropes in one section to help with the descent which I'm guessing is why it's called the High Adventure Trail.

It did go straight down the mountain.

We continued down the Lula Fall Trail to Lula Lake Falls.

You could probably walk behind the falls but it was really slick here and we didn't get too close.

We did get very wet by the spray though.  We hiked up the gravel road a bit to the actual lake which also has a waterfall into it.

 We continued on the gravel road and then did the North Creek Trail which we had all to ourselves.

We knew the boys were probably getting tired so we decided to take the Ford Trail back to the gravel road leading to the new parking lot because it would cut off some distance.  Unfortunately we didn't really think why the trail would be called the Ford Trail.  We had to totally ford the Rock Creek.  And it was deep!  Up to our knees at least and moving pretty quick.  I was more concerned with falling with Gray on my back than taking pictures and totally regret that I didn't get any photos.  We all made it across with out slipping and Gray even stayed asleep in the backpack.

We continued up the gravel road and to our car.  We headed back to Franklin after that.  It was a great two-day trip to Chattanooga!