In the Beginning...

My newlywed sister-in-law asked me what kind of dates Jason and I went on when we were first married, and I had a great walk down memory lane thinking of all the things we used to do BC (before children, that is). We started this blog a week or two before Leah was born, which means that there is a full 2 and a half years of "The Morales Family" that hasn't been recorded, with the exception of a few journal entries and a digital file full of pictures.

I'm not committing to anything grand, but I've decided to revisit life BC here once in a while. Just to remind myself about the beginning. It was only a few years, but it's time that we'll never have back, and I don't want to forget it.

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I'll start with an adventure we took near the end of life BC. In June of 2006 we drove to Colorado, as we had done many, many times before. On I-70 there is a lake just off the highway called Hanging Lake. You can hike up to this beautiful, hidden lake that is perched on the edge of a mountainside (hence, the "hanging") in 2 or so hours. We'd driven by the sign to the lake many, many times on our many trips to Denver, and this time I decided we should make time to stop and hike the trail. I was 2 months or so pregnant with Leah, and I thought it might be the last time we could do it so easily.
According to Wikipedia, the hike is "a 1.2 mile climb in what the Park Service calls a "difficult" trail. Hikers are advised to bring enough water. The trail is quite steep in some areas areas and requires hikers to traverse very rocky areas. There are very few level spots on the trail." I am not much of a hiker, but I grabbed my hiking stick, as I told Jason all good hikers need, and we headed up. The trail follows a river, and I can remember at times on the way up thinking we were getting lost, but Jason always assured me we were going the right way because we could hear the water running down the mountain.
We had a good chat on the way up, nothing I can remember of consequence. We probably spent most of the time talking about the baby and being pregnant and becoming parents. (Side note, we didn't tell anyone in Denver that we were expecting a baby at that time. In fact, I don't think anyone knew yet. Hee hee! Sneaky, weren't we?)

This is me pretending to know what I might look like with a pregnant belly. Ha! What a surprise I was in for!)

Then we reached the mountain-scaling part of the hike, where there are stairs cut out of the stone in the mountainside and rickety metal pipes coming out of the ground to catch you if you start falling off the side of the mountain. I was nervous- it was a little tricky, but the views were amazing. We kept climbing up these stairs, and all of the sudden, there it was! This beautiful, crystal-clear lake that we had driven by so many times before and never knew it was there. It was cold up there, but so worth the hike.
We were chasing daylight on the way down, and I remember talking about how we could stop by and hike this trail again in 10 years or so when our kids were driving us crazy on our roadtrip and needed to burn off some energy. So get ready, kids!