outdoors – Page 6 – thosecoolkims

Getting in touch with our natural side

Ruby + I decided to mix things up and go outdoors to appreciate a little nature in our own backyard – so when the opportunity came up to purchase a parking pass at the El Dorado Park Nature Center at a seriously reduced price, we decided to jump on the opportunity! Even better – our new friends Amber + Nora live nearby and were happy to join us!

Nora is a natural on the rocks and lends a confident hand to Miss Ruby, who is definitely the City Slicker of the two. (Just like her momma)

Amber, besides being an awesome momma + awesome friend, turns out to be an awesome photographer as well! We are looking forward to many more jaunts outdoors with these two!

Pumpkin Patch FAIL

As new parents, we were obviously very excited to take Ruby on her very first field trip to the pumpkin patch. We had visions of our adorable little baby clapping with glee as she looked at all of the pumpkins, and her cute little cherub face hamming things up as we shot a few pictures to capture the moment.

One word: NOPE.

For whatever reason, Little Miss Ruby did NOT enjoy her first trip to the pumpkin patch.

What to do? First, we tried to distract her with silly cut out photo ops …

Boring! You can see by looking at her here, she just wasn’t interested.

How about checking to see how tall you are, Ruby?

Nah, couldn’t care less.

So there it goes. Ruby wasn’t that into it. Oh well. There’s always next year.

At least we got her to smile for ONE pic …

The Kims go “camping”

For those of you who know us, you may be surprised to see our name and the word “camping” next to each other in a sentence. But our friends suggested we should all go camping together, so we decided to be open-minded and try it out! All of our girls are staggered in age, and since it was the 1st time for all of us to camp with a munchkin, we figured we’d all be in the same boat. To make things somewhat easier, we decided to stay at Campland in San Diego. It’s on Mission Bay, and basically – right in the middle of the city. The only thing that made it camping was sleeping in a tent and having a site with dirt … everything else was pretty easy and convenient. Campland had showers, electricity, a market, a pool, a park … and even Domino’s was delivering pizzas to some of the sites! It may not necessarily be “roughing it” … but at times, it was a little rough! :)

Thank goodness Ed is so awesome – he set up the tent right away with no problems.

The girls got cozy (and dirty!) right away as well …

And once the sun went down, Ruby got to debut some super cute campfire fashion – the little lamb pj’s!

Unfortunately, despite many trials in the pack and play, Ruby just didn’t like sleeping in the tent for some reason. This can also be translated as unfortunately, no one in the Kim family got much sleep in the tent.

Although we had a major lack of sleep, there were some highlights. The 1st was that Ruby was happy as a clam in the pool!

She spent an hour and a half in there non-stop! She was a very happy baby in the water.

Also super awesome was our introduction to “Hobo Stew” …

Basically, you chop up a bunch of veggies, potatoes and sausage. Then you take a piece of tin foil and load up whatever fillings you choose. We had a variety of sauces to add to the mix, such as ketchup, bbq sauce, mustards, wine, beer, etc. that you could top off with before sealing your creation in the tin foil and setting it in the fire pit. The sausage starts cookin’, the steam rises inside and cooks your veggies, and then about 15-20 minutes later you have a pretty good hot meal if I do say so myself!

Thanks to our friends the Arzates for introducing us to Hobo Stew!

All in all, we’re glad we did it – but its safe to say the Kims won’t be camping anytime soon. (Unless you’ve got an awesome vintage Airstream trailer we may be able to borrow from you … :)

A Day at the Farm

On Sunday, we headed out to Tanaka Farms in Irvine with Ruby’s future BFF’s Berlin & Violet to take a Strawberry Tour! It was so much fun and we even got to pick our own strawberries.

First things first – you get to go for a ride around the farm in a tractor! Very exciting, especially for the kiddos. As you roll along, they stop to show you the different types of crops – and you even get to sample the produce!

Ruby was very into her carrot!

Violet sampling some celery …

Berlin double-fisting wax beans and celery!

Once we got to the strawberry fields, we all got off the tractor and got to pick our own berries. Each person got to fill their own clamshell. Ruby was into the picking – those pretty red berries definitely caught her eye!

Tanaka Farms rules! We’ve already talked about making plans to go back in August for the Watermelon Tour … and I want to go again in October to check out the pumpkin patch.

Click here to see more pics at the farm!

Carrie Runs Her First 5K!

Carrie and I both want to be good examples to Ruby when it comes to diet and fitness. To that end, Carrie and a few friends had started doing these aggressive hikes up and down nearby Signal Hill a couple times a week. Later, they heard about a 5K happening here in Long Beach, so it sounded like fun to walk it.

But wait…Carrie wondered aloud why she should walk it when she could run it? Well, here’s a reason: she’s never really run before, and running without proper training and equipment can have really adverse effects. So, Carrie and I spent several weeks training, using a step by step program to make sure we wouldn’t hurt ourselves.

She did it. Day by day, her distances got longer and by raceday, she was ready!

Warming up…

Our friend Jen did it too! Runners ready to kick butt.

Ruby ready to cheer mom on!

Carrie flew out of the gate, listening to a custom music playlist I had created just for this run. The course entailed lapping part of El Dorado Park four times, and she quickly got out ahead of the walking crowd.

By the time she was finishing the first lap, she was so far ahead of the pack that she was nearly alone!