Vacation; Days 1-2

Since David is still considered a "young guy" after four and a half years at the railroad, he gets pretty much the worst vacation times. Usually he's lucky enough to get at least one week during the summer, but this year he had both weeks back-to-back at the beginning of this month. We thought long and hard about where to go for vacation, and Oregon won. We figured we could have the most fun for the cheapest, without being too much of a burden on friends and family. 

I took over three hundred pictures over the course of our ten-day trip (yay, digital cameras!), but many of them ended up in the Great Unknown that is the recycle bin of my computer. I still have plenty on my computer, but don't worry. I won't post them all. Just a few of the best from each day.

Day 1: Lots of Travel, and a Basketball Game.

We got up at 5 a.m. to begin our journey to Portland. I was so excited that I couldn't sleep. The kids must've felt the same way. They didn't sleep at all for the first few hours of the trip, and after that, only about an hour or so each.

This is my attempt at being artsy, as I watched the sun rise in the rear view mirror.

I loved how the sun was shining in my mirror, while the scenery in front of me was so gray.

I enjoyed a gorgeous sunrise while David took the boys in for a pit stop.

We stopped along the Columbia River just to get out of the car for a bit. We loved seeing the barges on the river, and seeing the cars driving in Washington on the other side. Simple pleasures...

I'm amazed that there are people smart enough to make things like this bridge. It lifts up, like it is in the picture, so boats can get under, then it goes back down and cars can drive across.

We actually made it to Portland in pretty good time; in time to go to the Trailblazers game with some friends. The kids loved that they could yell and cheer and, rather than getting annoyed, people thought it was cute.

Day 2: Portland, Some More Travel and Seaside

We spent the first night in Portland, then the next day we bummed around Chinatown for a while. I was sorely disappointed. I think we should have found a map before hand, because the GPS on my phone directed us to the quiet, boring part of town where we saw nothing particularly Asian-looking. Later, we learned that there is an actual entrance with a big gate and some dragon statues. There's also a garden that's supposed to be quite beautiful. But we didn't find it the day we were there. We did get a chance to walk along the river, and watch some people feed seagulls. It was still fun, and the kids had a great time.

After we saw everything we thought there was to see (boy, were we mistaken--can't wait to go back...), we headed to Seaside where we had booked a hotel room at the spur of the moment. We had heard Seaside is a great little town (and it's true!), so we figured we'd better check it out. As soon as we got there, we wished we had planned on spending more than one day there. The hotel was pretty empty, so when David called to make sure we got a room with two beds (the room in Portland only had one. Kids had to sleep on the floor),  the concierge told us that they had upgraded us to an ocean view room with a kitchenette. It was an amazing room, and an even more amazing view!

 

Below this balcony was a five-foot wide patch of grass, a five foot wide walkway, a rock wall, then the beach. And the ocean!

Our hotel, from the "back yard."

I like to take pictures of people walking from behind them. It's something I inherited from my Granddad. 

I also like it when the people turn around and walk back toward me. Especially the cute ones...

Some more pictures of the view from our balcony. I wouldn't mind living in one of those houses. Except that things seemed perpetually damp with all the rain.

After we got cold and tired from playing on the beach, we went to an arcade in town. Drew won a whale race (he was playing against Owen and Samantha, so basically Mom and Dad paid three bucks for that little penguin), and was very proud of his prize. He also loves making the peace sign in pictures suddenly; I think he got that from me. 

Day Three we traveled along the coast, spent a while at the Tillamook cheese factory, and ended up in Newport where we stayed for a couple days. More on that tomorrow!

Tell Us A Joke

I've taught Drew a couple jokes. He's pretty good at telling the knock-knock joke I taught him:

Yesterday, while I was making peanut butter and jam sandwiches, I tried to teach him a new joke:

Q: What did one Strawberry say to the other strawberry?

A: Looks like we're in a jam here!

Drew sort of laughed, then his eyes got really wide as he regarded the jar of jam on the counter and asked me, "Are there talking strawberries in there?"

This Is Pretty Cool

I've posted before about the registering for the Bone Marrow Donor list. Today, I noticed a Facebook status update of one of the young women from church. She's in eight grade, and for a school service project, she set up a bone marrow registry drive. Her goal was to get 26 people to sign up for the registry; she got 45! She was interviewed by the local news stations. There wasn't a code to embed the video into this post, so click here to watch it.

Rent A Kid

A couple years ago, some friends of ours asked if they could borrow Samantha for a night or two so he could prove to his wife that she did not want another kid. Well, of course, we're always more than happy to pawn our kids off on other people help out a friend. The problem was, Samantha decided to be really well behaved for those two days, so the wife still thought she wanted a baby, and almost had our friend convinced.

After we had Samantha, David and I decided we're fairly convinced that we're done. No more kids for us. Well, I was only fairly convinced, David was completely convinced. Lately I've been feeling more and more settled. I'm done having kids.

Two Sundays ago, when a friend asked me if I'd watch her three-month-old baby boy, I started to get nervous. What if it's a sign that I'm not done? That I need to practice up? But I agreed to watch the boy anyway, because he's really a very cute baby.

So for the last two weeks we had a little tiny baby at our house. The kids absolutely loved it. Baby Micah came over a little after 7 a.m. every day, so when the kids woke up he was already here, usually sleeping. They would tiptoe into the living room, whispering to each other, "Baby Micah is sleeping. You have to be quiet!" (Or as Samantha would say, "Baby Bicah beeping!") They would sit there and watch him until he started to stir just a little bit, then they would get so excited: "He's waking up! Let's play with him!" And they would pat his cheeks and kiss his hair so that even if he hadn't actually been waking up, he wasn't sleeping any more. He didn't seem to care. He always had a smile (a cute, dimply-cheeked, toothless smile) for everyone.

Drew liked baby Micah so much that he came up to me in all seriousness and asked, "Mom, can we take Samantha back and keep baby Micah?" I had to try really hard to keep a straight face while I told him that Micah's mom would probably be very sad if we kept Micah, and that we couldn't even trade because Micah's mom already has a girl named Samantha.

Samantha loved to play with Micah, too, but has also been having fun taking care of her own "babies." Any doll or stuffed animal in the house is the baby. And they are all named Baby. Then Samantha will tell me, "I'm the mommy. You're the Grandma." She'd been playing this game for about a month now, but it's become much more frequent. Recently she's given herself more responsibility. She will pretend to dress her baby and change its diaper, and while she's doing it she'll tell me, pointing to herself, "This is mom's job. Mom's job. Okay?" And she'll look at me very sternly to make sure I understand.

I think David was wondering if I was going to try to convince him that we need to have another baby. I actually mentioned it, only partly in jest, to see what he would say. He said, "Are you serious?!?!" I assured him I wasn't totally serious, but wouldn't it be fun to have a cute little baby around? And the kids were having so much fun.

But after two weeks of having such a delightful baby at our house, I came to the conclusion that I am definitely finished reproducing and am ready to channel all my energies into raising the kids I have.

If this had been our friend, he would have considered it a successful rental.

What Are You Funny About?

My kids love to be the reason I'm giggling. Which is good, because it happens a lot. One of them does something funny, I laugh, and the funny kid will ask, "What a you laughing about? Me? Cool!" Then the kid will proceed to try to recreate whatever I was laughing at.

I love it when Samantha asks me what I'm laughing about. She doesn't use the word "laughing"--instead she asks, "What are you funny about?" Which usually makes me laugh even more. Tonight, Samantha and I were going through her bedtime routine. We had said prayers and were singing a song. She likes to sing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" all by herself, then she gives me a turn to sing a song to her. I was singing "Reverently, Quietly," and she decided she wanted to have a turn. She sang it like this: "Revely, Riley. Ryler, Cokely. Bett? Brian?" I started cracking up. She went from singing the song to listing the names of our neighbor friends, Riley, Skyler, Oakley, Bret and Brian. I couldn't stop giggling. So of course she asked me, "What are you funny about?" You, my dear girl. You.