Pit stops ....

We are currently on our 4th day in our voyage to Matt & JoAnn's and Disneyland. I am blogging right now, from my iphone, in the middle of california's central valley, countless groves of orange trees whipping by us at breakneck speed. It takes us 17+ hours to drive there from our house and it is always an adventure.

Whenever we go to California we always try to make a stop off at Aaron and Emily's. They live about 4hrs away and it is always so fun to see them.

Each time we are there, Levi takes time to assemble a wooden puzzle that is at their house. This time Emily asked Levi to teach her how to do it because the kids always get a hold of it and she has the hardest time putting it back together. Here is levi doing his thing:

Aaron & Emily also have the birds that Joe and his brothers had, growing up. Their names are: Ricky and Sage. Sage was Joe's and she is an old crotchety stinker of a bird. Ricky, is at least a little more friendly. The boys loved playing with her and holding her. It was fun to have Adele show her big cousins how to handle a bird, she is such a cutie!


The boys taking turns holding the bird:












Ricky, taking refuge on Joe:



It was so fun to be able to take a breather and play with cousins. We are so glad they are relatively close!

Next we drove the 6 hours down to the Bay Area. But, we had barely entered California when a huge rock hit our windshield and cracked it. As the kids would say, the California curse continues.. Joe gets to drive many hours squinting around a line through his vision. Fun.



At least when we got to grandma's safely!!

The boys were SO happy to see grandma and grandpa. All they wanted to do was play with them at their house. We couldn't persuade them to go anywhere else.

Luckily they have such an awesome Grandma that she had some really cool activities planned. We got there the last day of the Chinese new year celebration and she had quite the party planned.

A Chinese feast:



Making Chinese lanterns:



Cooking together:



Loving Danielle and xochitl:






Eating with chopsticks:















Cute little daredevil:





Kaelan.... Not sharing:




The balloon drop and pop:




Popping a balloon:

And last, but not least:

The Flour game.

Kaelan was not a fan!






Messing around with all of grandma's awesome dress ups:





While the kids had so much fun with grandma, us big kids played games, went to movies, went running, practiced yoga, and went to basketball games. Not a bad 36 hours!

Thank you, grandma, for such a fun stay!!

Only three more hours to go....and then we will be all done with pit stops. For now.

(honorable mention to my iPhone for not only keeping me entertained on the road, but also keeping me productive.)

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Location:On the road

Shoe shopping with KK

This is what KK did the other day while I shopped for "tall" shoes (to help him pass the height mark for Disneyland rides.)

This is the look of a satisfied customer:


New boots... Now if only I could get him to take them off!


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Location:Tualatin, OR

Seattle, down under

Remi was our host for 3 days. On Saturday we had originally wanted to go to the Harry Potter exhibit in Seattle, but after realizing it would cost us $150 just to go see a bunch of movie props it wasn't quite as appealing.
Instead we opted to go on the army base with Remi and see her office (and hopefully glimpse a tank or two). The boys loved this!

Here we are in her snazzy Rx office:


Boys are totally enamored with having an aunt in the army. She is the coolest aunt ever.



KK really loved the doctor examination table in her office.

After the base visit we decided to go to the Kitsap peninsula and take a ferry from there into Seattle. I don't know why I didn't take photos of that, but we did get a good shot of the amazing bridge that gets you onto the peninsula.



When we got to seattle we messed around in Pioneer Square and went on the underground tour. Which, by the way, was amazing. Definitely recommend that one.

Here we are playing in a toystore in one of the original underground buildings:


Calder wanted to buy everything in there, I can imagine he was pretty disappointed when we left empty handed!



The tour really helped him forget though!

Seattle really has an interesting history. Look it up sometime. I read a book once called "Armageddon's children" and in the story these kids lived in the forgotten underground passages of Seattle after that I have always wanted to do the tour to find out more. Basically they did a really crappy job building Seattle the first time around. When the tides would come in the streets would flood, children would drown in the streets, they used sawdust to layer the streets which created pot holes big enough to be mapped. Whole cart and horse units would disappear in them. The their "Crappers" would explode raw sewage when the tide came in, etc. Pretty nasty place to live. Then, as fortune would have it, the entire city burnt to the ground in one night and they decided to do things right this time.... Sort of. What they ended up doing was building 15-30 ft walls that completely enclosed each of the 33 square blocks of the city. Then they filled the streets in with dirt and debris until the streets were as high as the tops of the walls. They had ladders at each corner for people to go down to the ground level inside each walled in block, and shop. Can you imagine??? Finally after many years they enclosed the first floor of every building entirely and put a side walk over the top of the walkways, kind of like ceiling-ed sidewalks underground. This made the second stories now the first story and then they built 7 sea walls to protect the city from flooding.

Here we are at actual ground level:



The infamous Crappers that graced the homes of most city dwellers:


Calder got a huge kick out of the exploding Crappers story, even shared the story with his class at school. Funny kid.

What happens when you use sawdust as filler for your foundation:

sunken floors

The floors caved and sunk 4 feet.

Here is the inside of a shop looking out the windows to where the street would have been:

you can see that these floors are also sunken

Looking up at the skylights that are built into all the sidewalks overhead:




Someones discarded bathtub:



Kind of eerie: Kaelan is standing on a street corner, underneath a street light, underneath the sidewalk!!

Below, You are looking at the first building rebuilt:

- remember that it's front door is not on it's first floor.

When all the buildings were built, they knew the plan was going to be that eventually people would all enter through the second floor, so for many years all of the buildings had floating doors on their second stories that led out to open air.

It was raining so hard that we got really wet above ground and underground.

Ansel was soaked.

Afterwards, we ate at an authentic Vietnamese restaurant...Yum!! Now I am itching to go on the underground tours of Portland.... only our underground history is much more nefarious...I guess I won't bring the kids on that one, it might give them nightmares!


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So much for planning

We drove up to Remi's house today to spend the weekend with her. Before we left I had scoped out movie times for Green Hornet at the theater near her house, made plans for Levi to babysit, and set the plans in motion before we got to her house. Things were going well until we got there. As we were getting off the freeway we noticed a huge nasty accident on the freeway's NB side and even cringed at the bodies being loaded on stretchers. The theater backs the freeway so as soon as we got off we were there. It was really weird because there were so many people out front but hardly any cars, and there were 3 fire trucks and the same number of ambulances in the parking lot. At first we didn't realize that the two were related, and wondered if someone was injured in the theater. But when we went up to buy tickets we were told the theater had to close down for the rest of the night because of the accident on the freeway! I still don't understand why closing the theater would help, but it doesn't matter since it wouldn't have made a difference to our plans. But it was still a first! Here we are in the theater trying to figure out what to next:

Remi and Joe






Joe and I in the parking lot with some of the emergency vehicles in the background:





And, if you are wondering, our substitute activity was ice cream at McDonalds. Where I found something very large and nasty in my food. Let's just say that It Cured me from any further cravings of McD's food for a long while yet!

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A little karate time

Calder and Ansel are in 7th heaven right now. They got karate lessons for Christmas and just started them a week ago. This is serious business for little boys and they are soaking up all the karate karma they can get.

Pure joy is being had by two little boys with big dreams of black belt status.

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Location: West Linn, OR