Stinging Nettle

Happy 4th of July to everyone! I hope you had a wonderful day celebrating with your family. We usually go with my family in the daytime every 4th and my husband's family in the evening; but because we weren't 100% sure if the kids would not get anybody sick we decided to do our own thing. 

We had the brilliant idea to take the kids hiking in 100 degree weather.

We also had the brilliant idea to not really check how long this hike was going to be. 

We are really smart.

The hike started out all right. We thought it was going to be this easy little 5 mile loop. We had plenty of water, some snacks and we were ready to go. It got hot, REALLY fast. The boys ripped off their shirts and everyone was a sweaty mess. We contemplated turning around but then we made it to shade and a little spring. 

We sat and rested for a while, everyone cooled off in the stream, we ate our snacks and we got our second wind. We also met some other hikers who told us the summit was just 10 minutes up ahead. We figured we would keep going. I don't know if the summit was 10 minutes ahead if you were hiking as just adults? Or if the guy was crazy, but needless to say it WASN'T 10 minutes away. More like an hour or so. By the time we made it to the spring we were completely out of water and our snack supply was dwindling. We had heard the spring water was ok to drink out of so we filled up our packs with the water and we all drank right out of the spring. 

Knock on wood, nobody has got diarrhea...yet.

We took another big break at the spring. I was feeling exhausted and just plopped down into the grass to rest; shortly after that my legs were stinging SO bad; of course I scratched them and made them even worse! They were bright red and really bothering me. I showed my husband where I had sat down and little did I realize I had sat down in a patch of stinging nettle. Once again, I am really smart.

Stinging Nettle

Lucky for me, my husband and sons are smarter than me. 

The whole hike the boys had pointed out stinging nettle and then they would point out the lamb's ear plant and told everyone how if you get stung by stinging nettle to just rub lamb's ear right onto the spot.

Lamb's Ear

So, they all found me some lamb's ear and we rubbed it all over my shins. Within a few minutes the stinging was gone and it wasn't red anymore! I heart nature.

Afterwards we checked our GPS and it told us we had already gone 3 miles, so we sat and contemplated whether we should finish the hike or turn around. Everyone was looking exhausted so we turned around. Thank heavens that we did! When we got home we looked up the hike and found out it was an 8.5 mile hike. 

So although the hike was a bit of a bust, we got to experiment with the dos and don'ts of nature. Always a teaching moment somewhere, even if it's because mom is being dumb.