Lately Jared and I have been feeling some nostalgia for Georgia. It must be this frigid Casper winter. For as muggy and miserable as the Georgia summers were, her mild winters were mighty fine. It's also fun to remember a time when we had the ability to get out on spontaneous little adventures fairly frequently. Between the freezing weather, living in the middle of nowhere, having a baby who hates his carseat, and Jared's demanding schedule, we don't get out a whole lot these days. I was too sick to blog much while I was pregnant, so I thought I'd revisit this spontaneous trip we made to Providence, GA. I was 5 months pregnant at the time, and Jared was sick with stress for a big upcoming test. Although I just wanted to stay curled up in the fetal position at home, I told Jared we were going to go for an adventure to get his mind off the test, so we drove 2 hours down to Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon."
Providence Canyon State Park is cool mostly because it's so unexpected in a state where pretty much the only scenery you get is enormous trees as far as the eye can see. This "Little Grand Canyon" isn't anything like the big grand canyon. The red "rock" is actually soil that has eroded away because of bad farming/irrigation practices in the area a century or two back. We were the only ones there when we hiked around the rim this October day, and the hike took less than an hour. It was the perfect low-key adventure for a permanently nauseated pregnant lady and her nervous nelly of a med student husband. Also, at 20+ weeks along, I was finally feeling up to taking a photo to announce my pregnancy. It wasn't anything fancy, but we love going on little explorations together so it seemed fitting to announce our baby boy in a quiet, outdoorsy location.
Right across the street from the canyon is an old church and tiny cemetery. I looooove all the old and overgrown cemeteries in the southeast. We looked around to see if we could find any interesting names for our baby boy, and then we laid down on the grass to rest and talk about names. One of my all-time favorite girl names is Lark (see above picture). Most people I tell this to think it's a weird name, but I love how unique it is. When I was a little girl, my mom told me that my grandma wanted to have twin girls named Brooke and Lark. I don't know if that's true, but the name has stuck with me ever since.
Unfortunately, the odds of me ever getting to name a daughter Lark are pretty slim. The first reason is that Jared is OBSESSED with having a little girl named Alice. Any time he has ever talked about a future child of ours, he always calls the child "Alice." Having a girl named Alice is more important to Jared than having a girl named Lark is to me. So we'd have to have two girls in order for me to use Lark, which seems pretty unlikely. There's a family tradition in the maternal line of my family where you only get to have one daughter. Add that to how horrifying my pregnancies are...it just seems unlikely that we'll get as far as two girls. So anyway, when I came upon this picture just barely, it occurred to me that maybe I could name a son Larkin instead if we end up with a couple more boys. Boy names are hard for us. I'll add it to our list.
On our way home to Atlanta, we made a detour into Alabama and stopped at the best BBQ shack probably on the planet. It is literally just a shack in the middle-of-nowhere Alabama with a sign out front that reads "BBQ." I included the picture above just in case we ever make it back to Alabama and need details on how to get here. Don't ask me why I was running a google search for "KFC near me." Must've been the only thing that didn't sound terrible to my pregnant self.
We ate a lot of fantastic BBQ when we lived in the South, but none as good as this. And that's saying something, considering that I was pregnant when I ate it and EVERYTHING tasted terrible to me when I was pregnant. No pregnancy cravings for this gal. Only pregnancy aversions to everything. Even water.
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