It had been a long weekend but I hadn't had a lot of time with Noah. I didn't spontaneously realize that. Jayne reminded me... while asking me to take him out for the afternoon. He was begging for the Children's museum downtown but we headed the other direction. Just up the coast from Mount Pleasant there's a trail that leads to a few shell rings down near the water. Basically trash piles of oyster / clam shells left by Native Americans a long time ago. My kids are, predictably, always underwhelmed. But it's a nice easy walk outdoors and so... I took Noah that Saturday.
We were walking on a small path along the marsh, Noah about ten feet ahead of me. I look down and see that I was about to step on a snake. A snake that Noah just walked past but missed, luckily. It was a rattlesnake - pretty cool. I've seens lots of snakes in South Carolina and a lot of them were poisonous but this was the first rattlesnake. It was still fairly cool and he/she was still very lethargic. He/she made halfway off of the path and then gave up. As Noah and I looked at it just sitting there, I had this thought: I could probably pick it up. It was sort of like the time I saw a shark in the surf and Nico yelled "grab it" and I tried it. It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder how my personal evolutionary line made it this far. But I didn't pick it up. Just took a few pictures and moved on.
You can just barely see that rattle at the end of it's tail. Since there's nothing to really give it scale, I'll just tell you that it was probably 12 feet long. But that's just an estimate. Could've been bigger.
Noah also got a chance to try a balance beam...
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