Keeping Us On Our Toes

These three have been the best pandemic surprise ever! They are so cute and funny. We've been getting them out pretty much every day for play time in the backyard.

The kids came up with this obstacle course and all our animals have been loving it! They climb, jump, chase each other around, and try to find ways to escape constantly.

Sweet little babies with their mama.

Poppy also loves the obstacle course--gives her a lot more things to jump over, which is pretty much her favorite thing to do.

I highly recommend over populating your home with guinea pigs if you want to mix things up :)

Double-decker!

The bridge.

Wiped out after play time.

So many opportunities for expansion, haha. Bug added this bridge to a little apartment up another layer. Only a couple of the pigs were brave enough to try that out.

So, pandemic fun continues!

We Love Our Daddy-o

In our church, the kids (under 12) usually sing a special musical number for both Father's Day and Mother's Day. With church at home, we decided the should all sing for their dad. :)

It was an impromptu performance, and we all loved it.

These kids are pretty lucky to have this dad of theirs. He's willing to be silly and hug a tree. He's good at teaching how to park. He will read the books they recommend (even if he doesn't read them fast enough to satisfy these voracious readers.) He'll stay up late to watch a movie, get up with kids who have had nightmares, and buy them treats if they go to the store with him (pre-Corona-not a lot of family trips to the store anymore.)

He's game for adventures and knows tons of facts, and if he doesn't already know, he's great at doing research.

Today, for the third time, Father's Day and the birthday of the girl who made him a dad coincided, so we got to celebrate two of our favorite people. They both love pizza and lasagna, so we did lasagna today, after yesterday's pizza. (These two are getting spoiled on the food!) And Bean made chocolate covered strawberries for dessert, which was awesome (and we may have eaten birthday cake, too ;).)

Sweer Sixteen

I don't know how it's been 16 years!

We decided to celebrate Bean's birthday on Saturday because her actual birthday was Father's Day and we wanted to give her a day that was all about her. She woke up to some of her favorite snacks and candies in poster form, her favorite breakfast (rice cereal) and a lazy morning before we got to have some fun.

Friends of ours were so kind to share their backyard pool while they were out of town this weekend, so we spent several hours swimming and lounging.

Bean and Bug practiced their water polo skills, while Peanut spent 90% of the time in the hot tub, haha.

I'm so glad these two have each other, now more than ever! They've been able to provide some of the much needed peer interaction.

(And Daddy-o and I have gotten to be Peanut's peers often during quarantine. So many imaginative games!)

We picked up pizza on the way home, played round after round of Nerts, and had cake and ice cream to finish off the night. She requested chocolate mint cake and Tillamook Cookies'n'Cream--so good!

We've been reading the blog together most weeks, starting from the beginning because Peanut wants to learn all about the family time before he was born and all the years he can't remember, and we just came across one of Bean's earlier birthdays when I had asked her about some favorites, so we thought it would be fun to do it again:

Favorite color: Teal
Favorite food: "There's too many--I can't choose."
Favorite thing to do: "Be outside"
Favorite book: "I have a lot of favorites--Wonder, Boys in the Boat, The War That Saved My Life, The War I Finally Won, The Giver, The Book Thief, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Vanderbeekers series, Trumpet of the Swan, The Wild Robot, All Quiet on the Western Front, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Little Prince"
Favorite song: "I listen to too much music--I don't know."
Favorite Desserts: "Any dessert I'm eating at the moment is my favorite.)
Favorite TV show:  Gilmore Girls!
Favorite Animals:  "My bunny and guinea pigs"
Favorite Movies: It's a Wonderful Life, any musical, Guardians of the Galaxy, Spiderman Homecoming

Favorite Sport : Water polo

She still loves the outside, and has a hard time picking favorites, haha. 

Happy Birthday, Bean!

Back Home

And just like that, summer break has begun. I had big plans of some sort of summer school happening, at least through the month of June, but everyone is tired, ready for independent projects, and once we came home from vacation, it just felt like things were over. Such an anticlimactic end to a pretty crazy school year. And my last year homeschooling multiple kids. Kind of crazy. I'd be more sad if it weren't for the very strong likelihood that my two high schoolers will be home at least part time this next year. Is it wrong for me to count that as one of the benefits of coronavirus? I know they want to be back at school, and that in most ways, it would be better for them to be there full time, but I feel like it softens the blow for me.

But, in this impossible-to-plan-ahead world we live in right now, we're just going to dive into summer and focus on the next thing. We brainstormed a list of things that we'd like to do this summer, and that are probably possible under current conditions, and I made a poster to remind us of these things, fully expecting some boredom later on, but so far, everyone's stayed pretty busy.

Poppy helps, for sure. She's hilarious, and so sweet--always game for snuggles.

And paired up with our guinea pig family, we've got our hands full. We've started taking the animals out in the backyard for play time regularly. The babies are small and have to have their cage overtop to keep them from dashing off where we may never find them. Keeps things exciting!

We also had our first in person D & D meetup. Kids sat at different tables by family, wore their masks, and just really enjoyed the face to face interaction.

Peanut and the other younger siblings painted and ran around for a bit. It's hard to keep them separated, but they do a pretty good job and with the masks and being outside, it seems like it's working. We just keep trying to find ways to be responsible, but also meet the needs of these kiddos.

Day 5: A Couple More Stops

We had to say goodbye to our home in the redwoods today, but we still had a couple adventures on the drive home. 

First up, a stop near McKinleyville to see the harbor seals and their pups. I think we were a few weeks too late to see young babies, but there were still plenty of seals hanging out. We watched them from the bluffs on the other side of the river, laughed at how they move on land, and then back into the car.

Stop #2 was the north end of Avenue of the Giants, at what might be MY favorite spot in the world. This sorrel covered spot in the redwoods is so incredibly beautiful.

In another nostalgic hike, we ran through these little trails, just like we did last year when we were trying to find an albino tree before it got dark.

Found the tree again, but had even more fun racing through the sorrel trails.

I'm not sure I can really pick a favorite spot because all of these forests are incredible, but this one is up at that top.

While we were in the area, we also hiked the Drury-Chaney trail, which was another great couple miles of easy redwood hiking. Climbing this stump added a little extra challenge.

And climbing on this fallen tree.

Redwoods are the best natural playground.

Our final views of this green.

Bean was playing around with the sorrel and using depth perception tricks to make it look like a giant forest with us as little people. It does look pretty cool from the underside.

And that was it for our adventures. The drive home was fairly uneventful--Bean got some practice in, we stopped at In-n-Out for a late lunch/early dinner, and our animals all made it home safe and sound. We had almost 23 hours to add to our 1000 hours challenge, 100s of pictures to sort through, and lower stress levels. Such a needed giveaway that I would gladly go on again next week.

Day 4: Nostalgia Hiking

We saved our hikes from the last trip to do on our last day. 

We fell completely in love with Trillium Falls last time--it was our first hike in the area, and it was drizzly and green and incredible. Well, with a forecast of showers all day on Monday, we thought we could recreate the magic. And it lived up to the memories. This picture above is Daddy-o's favorite spot on earth--the bridge, the ferns, the trees. It's a pretty good spot. 

So much new life growing from the fallen redwoods.

And then the falls. Not huge, but so pretty. And we even managed to get a decent family shot! That's a rare occurrence. 

We hung out at the bridge/falls for awhile. This is where we turned around last time, but we weren't as rushed this time, so we decided we'd go on and do the rest of the loop.

But first, more waterfall pictures.

Peanut always wants to do a silly one.

We love bridges. Why do they make hikes so much more fun?

There are just so many giant trees. You'd think it would stop being impressive, but they continue to wow us.

This patch of skunk cabbage was huge--like 2-3 feet tall!

Right about here, where we stopped for lunch, we realized that Bug's hat was no longer hanging on his backpack. Right then, a couple hikers passed us and when we asked, they confirmed that yes, his hat was back there. They had put it up on a log, but they said it was way back, closer to the falls, and the beginning part of the trail, so we decided that the best thing to do would be to finish the loop, which was only another mile or so, and then hike back through our favorite part of the loop to get the hat.

So, we got to see more of this than we'd planned. And another view of the falls, and we did find the hat!

Another favorite spot! So many ferns!

I used to think the term "forest bathing" was a little weird, but there is really no better way to describe the sensation of soaking up all of this beauty and peace. And spending big chunks of the day wandering through this incredible forests feels just as refreshing and cleansing as any bath I've every taken.

This trail was also one of the best for nature finds! Banana slugs, awesome fungi, two different types of snails, tons of millipedes, and two northern red-legged frogs! The frog was a really fun find--not something we typically see.

Then, we went to the Prairie Creek Trail which was the other spot we had explored last year. We didn't really have plans to do the full trail we'd done before, but ended up going for a couple miles again.

We kept looking for cool nature finds.

We tried out all the potential "homes" we could move into.

We walked through trees.

And then we ended with some playtime down by the creek.

Skipping rocks, finding fresh water snails,

and crossing on fallen logs.

It was such a fantastic, drizzly, sometimes rainy, day of reminiscing about our favorite spots from last year. I love getting to do things we've already fallen in love with, and explore new places, too. There are still plenty of new hikes up here to keep us busy for many more return trips.

It's also nice that everyone in the family can hike for several miles now without much complaining. Peanut didn't always want to keep going, but he did it anyway. And most days, he was lost in his head, inventing new languages or coming up with story plots and characters, so he'd keep walking for miles before he even realized how long we'd been going. I think this day was another 8 mile day between the two hikes. We were all pretty wiped out by the end. Over 20 miles in three days is no joke! 

Our last night was spent grilling pork tenderloin, watching the baby birds we'd discovered in the shed behind our house be fed, and watching Spiderman. This getaway was just what we needed, and we still had a stop to make on the way home.