Zion National Park

Our family got to experience the great outdoors over the weekend.....the great outdoors in another part of the state that is much warmer than our part of the state.

We went hiking, ran over and through giant red rocks and played with cousins.  We finally took the trip to Zions National Park that we have been saying we should take.  And we got to wear short sleeve shirts for the first time in months.

At least I did.

We have young men in the family and apparently, they don't need to stay warm during the winter months and can wear short sleeve shirts and even shorts when it is snowing.

In Zions, they wore their short sleeves when it was actually sunny outside with critters grazing peacefully in wild meadows as opposed to critters who are grazing in neighborhoods by our house because they are tired of rooting for food in the snow capped mountains.

On one of our hikes,  Chance and his cousin who were ahead of the group, decided to bypass the" trail closed", sign and continue on to explore up the path.

I don't know that the boys realized the path was closed as there was room off to the side of the sign to go on ahead and several people were coming up from the forbidden domain when Chance and his cousin arrived.

The long and the short of it is, Chance and his cousin casually continued past the path closed sign and I could see Chance looking around at the colorful rock walls that were weeping little paths of water down their  faces.

As is the case with my deaf boy, once he gets past a certain distance, he can not hear us. With implants that distance is quite remarkable, but when you are out in the wilderness, you can quickly get out of ear shot.

With young bodies and youthful energy, Chance and his cousin made fast work of covering the path.  One minute they were just off in the distance, and the next second they were scaling ever higher elevations on a hill opposite us separated by a large gulf.

We could see Chance's head pop up through the underbrush every once in a while, though he was now at a distance where a child with normal hearing would have a difficult time hearing us call their name.

We called to Chance to come back while waving our arms to get his attention.

He waved back  cheerfully and then continued on his way.

Funny thing with parenting a deaf child.....at what point is it disobedience, and when is it just not being able to hear? Sometimes it is just hard to know.

Chance's cousins parents said they knew their son heard them.  He just decided to pretend he didn't and continue on with Chance.

We were waving like we were trying to land a small aircraft and Chance thought we were just waving hello?

We'll never know exactly what the boys did and did not hear.

Eventually, we sent their two older brothers out to get them.

If you are going to have one boy on a forbidden trail, perhaps fraught with danger, the only logical thing to do is send up another son to see if death awaits around the next corner.

The older brothers made fast work of that trail and soon returned with their younger brothers in toe.