Food Storage

Just because I found it today (while surfing the web instead of posting photos of our vacation) and I thought it was amazing:

http://www.hotcouponworld.com/forums/stockpile-pictures/186939-crabtree122202s-stockpile-pictures.html

Yeah. Amazing, huh? Now THAT'S food storage. Be still my beating heart. Sure makes my 12 bottles of ketsup look pretty lame. By the way, Ashlee, do you know this Crabtree? If so, we need to talk.

Now to post pictures of vacation... after I read what Pioneer Woman's up to today.

Ryan's Birthday

This past Tuesday Ryan turned 34. To celebrate, we had Ryan's parents and grandparents over to dinner. As the birthday boy, he got to decide the dinner menu: flank steak, mashed potatoes, spinach salad, rolls, and blueberry pie. My parents stopped by later on to have pie and ice cream with us.



Miriam decided she liked flank steak. Wouldn't eat any watermelon and treated the mashed potatoes like playdough, but loooooved the steak. Go figure.

Ryan prefers pie to cake, so every year we make him his favorite: blueberry pie. It's nice that blueberries are in season and usually on sale around his birthday. Hannah and Emma usually hint very strongly that they'd rather be having birthday cake, but they eat some ice cream and are happy enough.

Happy birthday Ryan! We love you!

Too Hot to Blog

Don't worry blog readers - we survived the terrible 2009 Seattle heat wave! I'm now sitting in my 67 degree house and loving every minute of it. I'm most comfortable between 68 and 72 degrees and, I've learned, I'm the most uncomfortable, cranky, and close to insanity when it's 106 degrees. True, it wasn't 106 in my house, it was only 90-ish degrees in there. Could have been worse. So now we're back to overcast mornings with filtered sun in the afternoons. Highs in the 70s. Perfection if you ask me.

Before our blasted heat wave, we went to downtown Seattle for the annual Torchlight Parade. We thought it was a hot day - ha! Little did we know what was in store....

Here's Ryan and Miriam waiting for the parade to begin.

Emma and Hannah staked out their spots right along 4th Avenue. Hannah's showing off her gum. My kids get really excited about gum. Is this normal?

Here's my Dad and Mom with us before the parade started. My Mom drives downtown early on the morning of the parade to put down a tarp to save our spot. Thanks Mom!

It doesn't usually rain on hot days in Seattle. This night, however, we got sprinkled on a bit, but it passed quickly and it kind of felt good. Miriam loved her first parade and wasn't scared by it a bit. Hannah, on the other hand, was in tears after the infamous Seafair pirates came by and shot off their cannon. Emma liked the parade's princesses the best and wasn't too bothered by the rowdy pirates.

Lake Wilderness

*** Before I begin this blog post, I must ask: does anyone else out there in blogland have trouble with Blogger's insert picture feature? Every time I upload the pictures, they come out in the opposite order of the way I uploaded them. Except then sometimes, I try to allow for this oddity and upload them in reverse order (I AM smarter than Blogger!), but then Blogger puts them in the exact order I uploaded them in. Huh? Does any one else have this problem? Does anyone know what I'm talking about for that matter? Ah, well. I feel better just having vented. Thank you. ***

Ryan wanted to take the girls on a hike this summer. He printed out a map of the Cougar Mountain trails and had planned to go there, but then we found out there was some bike ride/race there the day we wanted to hike.

Hmmm...

New hikers with short, slow legs + bike racers = bad idea.

So, Ryan suggested "hiking" around Lake Wilderness. The first part was wooded and the girls thought it was great.




Eventually the trail came out of the woods and wasn't shady.

New hikers with short, slow legs + hot sun, no shade = unhappy New Hikers.

Ryan said he thinks the Lake Wilderness trail is about 2 miles. Does anyone know for sure? I'd love to know. If it is a 2 mile trail, the girls were done hiking at exactly .75 miles. Hannah was a trooper and kept her complaints to a minimum. Emma made no attempts to hide her dissatisfaction with the situation, exclaiming, "I don't like hiking!" Note her sour expression in this picture.
Luckily, Ryan sang a rousing version of "Boom, boom ain't it great to be crazy" and saved us from a full on mutiny. Lesson learned: never doubt the power of a well-timed, totally nonsensical camp song. If I remember correctly, Ryan may have even tried to sing "The Bear in Tennis Shoes" song, but I was in no mood for providing his echo at that point.

Eventually, we got to a park so we could sit and the girls could play a bit. Emma, though crying, dragging her feet, and being "tired of WALKING!!!" was miraculously cured of all her ills.

Hot, tired family + park = perfectly happy family


On second thought, Miriam wasn't perfectly happy. She'd fallen asleep in the back pack just about the time the girls' hiking revolt began. She'd slept through the whining, but had woken up when Ryan sat down at the park.

Sleeping baby in back pack + sitting, non-walking Dad = awake baby


After the park, when we were almost back to the car, the girls took their shoes and socks off and walked through the water on the beach. We were all tired and ready to be done, but we're pretty sure we'll be able to talk the girls into going hiking again. Anyone know of any .75 mile hikes?

Giggle Girl

Miriam likes to mimic us and play the "can you say..." game. Tonight, she was especially giggly. Right at the beginning of the video she's saying "Dada." At the end, when she does the duck sound, you'll notice her look out the back window. She's looking for the ducks that live in the pond behind our house and regularly fly over our yard.

Two months later...

Hellooooooo out there in blog land!! Does anybody still check this blog for updates? Google Reader comes in really handy when you're checking blogs like this one, huh?

So, let's see... well, we moved. Here's the garage at our new house after we'd moved everyting in from our old house. It looked like this for one week because we moved it in before the houses actually closed. Once all the deals were closed, we moved the stuff from the garage into the house. That's what we get for agreeing to close on a Thursday. Lesson learned.

Oh, and because I'm sure you were all wondering: Hannah did ride the bus for the last two weeks of school. She loved it and didn't seem to get too bothered by my daily questions (interrogations) about who she sat with, what people were talking about, who got in trouble, etc. What can I say? I have bus issues.

So now we're all moved in. Not all unpacked, mind you, but moved in and comfortable. We love our house, our new neighborhood, new yard, everything. We already knew a lot of the kids in our new neighborhood from preschool and school. It's been so nice to just walk to so many different friends' houses for impromptu play dates. We have a community park we can walk to and even a little store within walking distance.

No one lived in our house for about a year, so the yard needed some major weeding when we moved in. There were weeds as tall as me. Seriously. I wish I'd taken "Before" pictures just to show the progress we've made. We're still working on the weeding and we've found some time to play outside. It was hot last week so Hannah and Emma played in the pool.

Notice Ryan in the background trying to get Miriam in the pool. Nothin' doing Dad. She may love the bath tub, but apparently that doesn't mean she loves all water.

Hannah was a little hyper.

Here's happy Miriam, a safe distance from the pool. Ever since we caught a tiny frog in our yard and put him in this bug habitat, Miriam's been fascinated with the habitat. Maybe she doesn't get that we released the frog back into the "wild" of our back yard....

On the morning of the Fourth of July, we went to the flag raising ceremony at our church building. I do love a good flag raising ceremony: peppy songs, patriotism, family, friends, and cinnamon rolls. Ryan and I stayed up late the night before making cinnamon rolls to bring and - yum - I'm glad we did.

That afternoon, we went to a local park and played at the playground and had a picnic dinner. We watched seaplanes take off and land, herons fly by, and kayakers float on Lake Washington. It was a beautiful day capped off by a fireworks display above Lake Washington.
Here's part of the crew that was there: Grandpa and Grandma Mattson, Ryan, Hannah, Me, Emma, Miriam, and Grandma Carlson. In the eveing, we were joined by a lot of friends from church so the girls had lots of playmates. They had so much fun running around with their friends that the fireworks were almost an afterthought. Hannah watched them intently, with her hands covering her ears. Emma watched the fireworks a bit, but was more interested in socializing with her friends.

To keep busy this summer (ha!) Hannah and Emma are taking swimming lessons. They both have face in the water issues, but I can tell they're trying hard to get over their fears. We're trying to get back into the habit of attending the library's weekly storytimes. Surprisingly, at the last storytime we attended, Hannah announced that she was too old for storytime. Choking back tears, I said, "Okay, you can just look for books to check out then." Allright... so I didn't really cry, but I was sad. She's always loved storytime, but it is really intended for preschoolers, so I understand why she feels that way. *Sniff*

That's all for now! Happy summer!

Nightshirts

While getting ready for bed a few nights ago, Hannah decided all her pajamas (hereafter referred to as P.J.s 'cause that's what we call them) were too warm and she couldn't possibly wear them on such a hot night. For the record, the temperature inside the house was probably no more than 74 degrees.

If I'd been home, I probably would have told her to get over it and put some P.J.s on. NOW.

But, as her luck would have it, I'd escaped to the grocery store and left Ryan in charge of baths and bed. Ryan decided to solve the P.J. dilemma by letting Hannah and Emma wear two of his T-shirts to bed.

Oh my goodness, if we'd gone to the store and bought them brand new P.J.s they wouldn't have been happier.

Ryan snapped these pictures before tucking them into bed.

When I came home later that night, Ryan didn't tell me about the T-shirts. He just said the girls were waiting for kisses before they went to sleep. I went upstairs and, though I found both girls in their beds, they couldn't have been more awake. Emma was shaking with excitement, "Mommy, Daddy let us wear his shirts to bed!!" Hannah, who had her face tucked into the neck of her shirt said, "Wow! I can see my whole body!"

Back downstairs, Ryan was pretty proud of himself. Not only were all three girls in bed, but they were happy! No one was crying, screaming for some water, complaining about her sister talking so she couldn't sleep, asking to use the bathroom, or any other sort of sleep-avoidance technique. To top it off, he told me he'd taken some pictures of the girls in their "nightshirts." "You might want to take some more pictures though," he said, "because you'd probably take better ones." I don't know. I think he got some pretty good shots.

Field Trip

I've always loved field trips. When I was in elementary school, we'd ride the county's Metro buses into downtown Seattle to visit cool museums and fortune cookie factories. Don't ask what educational value a fortune cookie factory has. It was fun and that's all that mattered to me.

Last week, Emma's preschool class had a field trip to a park that sits on Lake Washington. Her class is currently studying ponds and wetlands so we walked along the park's waterfront trail, noting any interesting wildlife or pondlife (is that a word?). It was a beautiful day. It's days like that one that make all the rainy and overcast days bearable.

See what I mean?

Here's Emma looking into a little inlet off the lake. There wasn't much in the wetlands, but we did see an eagle flying overhead.

Before our walk began, Emma's teacher said we might see turtles along the water. I quickly dismissed this because I've walked this trail many times and never once seen a turtle. Bunnies, ducks, geese, various birds, and fish? Yes. Turtles? No.

During our wildlife walk I learned an important lesson: never think you know more than a preschool teacher who's been doing the same field trip for almost 20 years. Sure enough, we saw turtles and they were so cool!

Here's one turtle sunning himself on the end of an old log!

Now, it should be known that I usually don't take pictures of two things: scenery and wildlife. Why? Because I'm not a photographer, that's why. The pictures I take don't end up looking like anything interesting and because scenery and wildlife pictures, in my opinion, are usually boring. Seriously, how many times have you been looking through someone's vacation pictures and it's so fun, but then you get to the nobody's-in-them beach, sunset, trees, mountains, etc pictures and you lose interest and quickly flip through until you find more pictures with humans in them? Hmmmmm? Maybe I'm the only one. But I doubt it.

But this turtle forced me to set aside my old ways. Isn't he cute? The only thing cuter than him was his buddy who was swimming like crazy (picture a turtle doing the dog paddle) trying to get out to the log. At first we thought Swimmer Turtle was just a stick jutting out of the water. After careful observation we noticed that he was moving against the current, making progress toward the log. Amazing. Eventually he got to the log so he and the other turtle could hang out.

Two peas in a pod. Two turtles on a log.

Further evidence as to why I'm not a wildlife photographer. I'm not good at it! But I also wanted to show Lake Washington with South Seattle in the background. There is a method to my madness.

Sold!

Has anyone seen the move Much Ado About Nothing? Possibly my favorite movie of all time. (Mental note: watch movie again soon.) There's a great scene in it when one character says to another something like this, "Against my better judgement, I bid you come in to dinner." I promise it's funny. Really. It is.

And so, against my better judgement, I stay up to write another blog post. I get pretty rummy after about 10:00 PM, so bear with me.

Four weeks, thirty showings, two open houses, and five offers later... our house sold.

To say that I'm happy would be an understatement. It's a huge relief. Since it sold last week I have been able to resume sleeping through the night rather than laying awake with worry. Seriously, selling a house is stressful. I expected it to be difficult - I'd read about that ("reading about it" is how people like me prepare themselves for situations they've never faced before), but was not prepared for how stressful if would be. Will people like my house? Why didn't they like my house? Is something wrong with my house? They think my house is worth WHAT? You want to show my house WHEN? In 15 minutes?!!!

Other issues I struggled with during the time our house was for sale:

• Is is bad to strap my kids in their car seats before doing the last quick sweep of the house before leaving for a showing?
• If Emma wets her bed and barfs all over the bathroom at 2:00 AM (she was sooo sick) and we have a 10:00 AM showing will the prospective Buyers be able to notice the smell?
• (Then, later that night/morning) What if Emma, who's now sleeping with me in my bed while Ryan's sleeping in her wet bed (house selling with sick kids isn't pretty folks) barfs all over my beloved duvet cover?
• Is it bad that I'm more concerned about the duvet cover than prospective Buyers smelling vomit in the house?

Can you see now why I was kept awake at night? These are big issues.

Thankfully, the house sold and we've now let our perfectly clean staged home revert to it's former state: un-swept and littered with half-dressed Barbies. Actually, it's gotten a bit worse than that. The other night Ryan and I looked around and decided that we'd let our house get kind of icky. Ryan said it's kind of like when some one's been fasting and then they finish and binge. We're binging on messiness.

The girls are relieved the house sold. Beyond the obvious annoyances of having to make their beds as if they're in the military, they're tired of having to evacuate for showings. Now, it's not too bad to leave your house and Barbies if you get to go to the park during the showing. That's a good deal. Here's a bad deal: you have a dinnertime showing and it's pouring down rain outside so you're stuck inside your minivan parked across the street from your house having to feed your cranky baby sister pieces of chicken nuggets just to keep her crying to a minimum. Bad deal indeed. It's character building, right?

We've purchased another house and are excited to move in around the end of May. We're moving only a few miles down the road - closer to Hannah's school. She'll actually be able to ride the bus! I'm so excited about the bus that I've considered making one of those paper chains where you take one link off for everyday until the big day. You know what I'm talking about, right? Everyday when I pack all three kids (one of whom is usually crying) into the car to drive Hannah to school I think, "one day closer to the bus." Then, as I'm driving to school, I think of all the inappropriate stuff that went on during my school bus-riding days. Then, I think about the conversations I'm going to have with Hannah about sitting as close to the front of the bus as possible and avoiding all inappropriate behavior. So, I talk big about being all excited, but my innocent baby riding the bus does worry me a little. Not surprising, I guess, considering the fact that I still tear up almost every day when I watch her walk away from the car and toward her classroom.