A visit from our CA cousins

This week Ed's parents came up from CA. They brought Ed's sister Jennifer and her kids, Elijah and Katie. Ahren and Nora were surprised to see their cousins. Ahren Saturday night when he answered the door and saw more than just Grandma and Grandpa at the door. Nora didn't get the full surprise untill Sunday morning. She tried to stay awake, but just couldn't make it. We even woke her up to say hi, but she had no memory of that. This picture was taken Monday afternoon. My kids have half days this week, so they were home kind of early to enjoy extra playtime.
On the swingset are: Elijah, Ahren holding Brock ( he's one of my day care kids), Katie in the baby swing, Nora, Tori ( Brock's big sis) and Ahren's friend Bradley from down the street. The kids had a great time running around. I was lucky to get them all in one place for the minute it took to take this picture. The photos below are of the epic battle that insued. Truly George Lucus worthy.

The Bug

This is our Nora. Last weekend turned out to be pretty special for her since her brother decided he needed to have a little alone time with the tv, and hanging out with the family at Costco and going to lunch is not his idea of fun. After the Costco feast of samples we headed to the 48th Ave. Salon for hair cuts. Ed's and Nora's, not mine. Nora was really tired of her long hair. She has an incredibly sensitive head, so I was all for shortening the every morning hair brushing battle. As you can see it turned out adorable.

In the above pictures our little ladybug is enjoying the wonder of chocolate gelato. After being closed for over a year, our favorite little Italian restaurant, Russillo's, has reopened at track 29 on Yakima Avenue. I love their pizza salad, served in a pizza crust bowl with the dressing of your choice and almost every pizza topping you can think of. Nora had her favorite, spagetti noodles with parmissan cheese, and nothing else, which she ate enough of to earn the gelato.

After lunch, it was off to the bowling ally. For this Ahren graced us with his presence. Nora loves to bowl, but she loves the nachos more. She is pictured below picking out the perfect bowling ball. Having a small child bowl with you tends to increase everyones score do to the invention of bumpers. Where were these things when I was a kid? Ahren likes real bowling because he can usually beat his sister, unlike in Wii bowling where none of us stands a chance against her.

Bug just had her first soccer practice, so look forward to upcoming post featuring shin gards and cleats (with pink stripes, or coarse).

The Boy

This is my 13 year old son Ahren. He is in the 7th grade, but will be happy to tell you that school is no where near his favorite thing.

Ahren is always amazing me with new talent. He is quite a juggler, and will attempt to juggle almost anything. He was even asked to be the street performer at our "Jeruslem Marketplace" VBS last summer. He plays trumpet in the school band, is an active leader in his youth group and is continuously trying to master the art of sarcasim. For the last year or so he has taken up photography. He is pictured here with one of his second place winners from the Central Washington State Fair. He also has a shutterfly page where he displays his favorite pictures. If you would like to view it let me know and I'll email the pass word to you. His newest interest is horses. His dad and stepmom live in Montana and they got him a horse for Christmas this year. He is so excited to get there this summer and have time to ride her.

Ahren took the pictures below in Cowiche Canyon last weekend.

Self portraits are becoming more and more frequent. This one was taken in our van on our way to or from somewhere, sometime before August. I can tell because he doesn't have his braces on.

That's just a bit about this quiet, lovable, furball we call The Boy. He keeps us laughing and always looking for a new perspective from which to view life.

Our "Stay-cation"

Usually on President's Day weekend the family takes off for the Oregon Coast. This year, since we had just spent a glorious week in Mexico, we decided we should stay home.
After reading an article about the growing popularity of "Stay-cations" we figured we'd give it a try. We went online and checked out all of the touristy things you forget about when you live in the town. Boy are there a bunch of them! Since it was also Valentines day on Saturday, we decided to build in dinner out, just Ed and I. That's easy to do when your not staying in a hotel. We also wanted to make sure we had some outdoor time and that we would do something none of us had done before.

Our first day we headed to Ellensburg. It's only a half an hour away, but being even a short way out of town makes my kids more willing to try new things. We started with lunch at the Yellow Church Cafe'. The building was built in 1928 as a Lutheren Church. We have lots of friends who rave about this place. One couple we know even ride their bikes from Yakima to Ellensburg on Easter, just to have brunch here.
The food was wonderful! I could have eaten nothing more than the Heavenly Loaf (bread with cheese, herbs and garlic baked in) and been very happy. However, I had my heavenly loaf with clam chowder and a ceasar salad. Fantastic!

Just one block away is "Dick and Jane's house" These two are local artists who have decorated their entire home and yard (and fence and everything else in sight) with. . . well, with garbage. There are hundereds of patterns in the fence made out of old rusty bottle caps. One pillar in the yard is covered in multi-colored plastic pop bottle caps. The garage is covered in old hub caps. And there are reflectors everywhere. If you have been to the Sundome in Yakima, this is the man who did the reflector art that goes around the top of it. We had a great time trying to find all the different types of junk that made up the artwork. I had heard about this place for years, and it was fun to finally see it up close. Totally worth the trip, just make sure you walk all the way around or you might miss something.






The next stop on our Ellensburg adventure was the Children's Activity Museum. This was really fun. There are several rooms set up with themes like dinosaurs, the bakery, school and farmers market. There is also a stage with costumes and puppets. My kids favorite area was right up front, it's basicaly a traffic cone with a big fan under it that you can float different size balls on. Nora found another use for it however.

There were also a ton of things to climb in and on, over and around. Ahren spent a good deal of time drawing with what amounted to a suspended piece of wood. You put a piece of paper on the wood, then you swing it in a circle or an elipse, then you drop a marker into a hole just above the paper where the center of the paper would be. Then you sit and watch the thing draw. Ahren made some pretty neat designs.

The Bull statue is in a shopping area we walked through. It's too hard to pass up getting your kids picture next to something like this.

On Saturday we got up late, a must for vacation, packed a lunch and headed out Summitview Ave. to the trail head for Cowiche Canyon. We have had to stop using the word "hike" with Ahren due to an unfortunate fall he took last year on a hike with his youth group. We told him we were going for a nature walk to find things to take pictures of. Witch we did. Ed and I had both forgotten that the canyon gets very little sun during this time of year. We quickly began to wish we had all brought our boots. We did about half the trail, taking plenty of time to examine all of the various rock formations, birds nests and designs made by the slowly melting ice near the creek. We saw two hawks circling above us, and several varieties of "tweety" birds. It was too cold to have to worry about rattle snakes, thank goodness, which is part of the reason we chose to go now, before it warms up.

Sunday I woke up with a migraine and was sooo gratefull to be able to just stay in bed and sleep. I did manage to get up to go to a pot luck at the church that night and attend the evening service. Then we took Nora to a friends house for her very first sleep over away from home. She has had a friend stay over at our house before, but this was a first. She did great, no midnight phones calls, no crying just a lot of fun. It didn't hurt that there were a total of six kids, ages 2-12 in that house that night. I think they just wore her out.

On Monday Ed took the kids to the movies and I watched one of my day care kids for a few hours. All in all, I think we had a great weekend. We will probably do more of this kind of vacation in the future. I may even get around to doing the room service breakfast menus they did in the Family Fun magazine.