In just a few weeks, our wee little man has transformed himself into an efficient walker and is picking up speed! Having completely given up on crawling, he can normally be found wandering about the house with some random item in his hand, generally a shoe. Consequently, we've been trying to come up with places to take him so that he has somewhere to run about. The weather during the Thanksgiving long weekend last week was nice so we wound up going on a few mini trips. The first was down to Middle Cove beach where it was a bit chilly with the wind but we had a nice time watching the huge waves crash on the rocks. For our second trip, we just did a quick loop behind our house up to Confederation Building where we got some nice views and Sam enjoyed riding on our shoulders (he's getting quite proficient at letting us know when he wants us to "giddy up"). The video below was taken just before we left the house and nicely illustrates Sam's improved walking skills as well as his need to always be carrying something.
Our final trip out was on Thanksgiving Monday and we discovered an absolute gem of a place. Bowring Park, which we had somehow managed to overlook all this time, is a public park, with over 200 acres of land, which was donated to the city in 1911 by the Bowring family. For those who don't know, the original Bowring store (from which the chain eventually developed) was established on Water Street in St. John's back in 1811 and remained within the Bowring family for generations. The park that the family gave to the city is a magical place. There are gorgeous man-made ponds with ducks and geese, walking trails, tons of little bridges, an enormous playground, a water park with slides, paved paths for biking and rollerblading, fields for playing sports and no end of trees and flowers. In a nutshell, we've now found the place to go on a nice day. We just can't believe how long it took us to discover the park but we're sure Sam is going to have a lot of fun playing there as he grows up. If you've never been, we highly recommend a visit!
