My 3 year old son is a bottle of lightning. He is very energetic and loves running around. Sometimes, I’m surprised that he is keeping up with the older kids he plays with at daycare in terms of speed and his endurance. He does need that physical outlet to fall asleep quickly at night since he has been getting out of bed a million times after story time.

The last few days, I have been brainstorming what to do with him (and all of his energy!), so we sometimes play it by ear. Today, I saw a window to take him on a short hike. I told him we could also go and buy popsicles for the family after the hike and he was super excited to spend time with me one-on-one (but actually he was probably more excited about the popsicles…). I told my wife that I would be back before dinner and off we went.

We blazed through the hike and he was waking around everywhere and in steep parts of the hike, he ended up wanting to run parts of it. He also wanted to hold my hand so we can help keep each other from falling. It was a really enjoyable hike and we had a great time talking with each other. I think he also needs that solo time with myself or my wife because there is so much he wants to talk about and it’s important that he gets the attention he deserves without any interruptions (I’m looking at both my newborn and my bernadoodle as the frequent culprits…).

After the hike, we went out to pick two sets of popsicles. He wanted to eat the chocolate vegan vanilla caramel swirl ice cream bar and save his fruit ones for later (and I’m not sure he meant to pick the vegan one, but that’s the box that was attractive to a 3 year old boy after a hike, so we went with it). I told him that if he eats the popsicle before dinner, he needs to make sure he eats his dinner without fussing since sometimes he doesn’t want to eat. No exceptions. He agreed and we had a deal. By the time we got home, he wasn’t done with his ice cream bar, so we sat outside and I had a fruit popsicle to partake.

After we were done, we hid the evidence so my 5 year old daughter wouldn’t be jealous. My wife was none the wiser that he had an ice cream bar because he didn’t mention it at all and ate his dinner like the deal terms outlined. I was so proud of how he crushed the hike that I was showing my wife the photos and videos I took of him running up the steep switchbacks. The last photo was him with an ice cream bar and she gave me a look, but hey, at least he ate all his dinner!