Beach Day

I love that picture of Cannon Beach.  We took the kids there for the first time on Tuesday, and once we got to the beach, enjoyed a beautiful day.  I don't know what's wrong with us that we haven't taken Daphne or Christian to Cannon Beach yet.  It's only one of my top 5 favorite beaches in the entire world (Daph was very impressed that I got to live there when I went to Ecola), but apparently we've been very lax in our beach adventures.

The drive is about an hour and a half, but since we like things wild, it took us 3 hours.  Our first issue had to do with a me staying with the car and getting gas in Hillsboro while David walked across the parking lot to my favorite Starbucks (185th, yay!), except he got confused and walked to a different Starbucks.  The kids and I sat at my favorite Starbucks for what felt like hours wondering where he was, me imagining him having disappeared into thin air, search parties, breaking news on TV; the whole 9 yards.  But we were finally reunited and it was fine.  Especially because he managed to get a Pumpkin Spice Latte at whatever other Starbucks he went to. 

Our second issue occurred when Christian started whimpering in the backseat when we were about 20 miles from CB.  But you know kids and whimpering: it happens so often you mostly tune it out.  What you can't tune out, though, is the sounds of massive amounts of vomit spewing from your child's mouth.  We pulled onto the first logging road we found and spent 45 minutes trying to clean up the disaster, something that's rather hard to do when you only have about 7 napkins in the glove box and you're almost out of wet wipes in the diaper bag.  David got sick too, because he does that when he sees other people get sick.  A trucker pulled over to tell us it was National Dog Day, so at least we had that.  

Obviously we were off to a rough start.  Cannon Beach was the busiest I think I've ever seen it, but we found a great parking spot, had a good lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, then spent the rest of the afternoon under the sun and on the beach.  Jonas was pretty good the whole day and the kids had a terrific time playing in the sand and water.  Lola found a few doggy friends to run with, so I think she enjoyed her Dog Day fairly well. 

We drove home uneventfully but in a rather malodorous car.  One feeding stop for Jonas meant we even missed city traffic.  Hurray for beach days.  

her favorite beach activity is digging a hole to hang out in

must've just been a little carsick, because he perked right back up

jonas's first beach trip

all of us

Fish and Other Stuff

We made our annual trip out to Bonneville Fish Hatchery last week.  We don't have air conditioning at our house (which is good because I don't like air conditioning), but when it gets really hot it's nice to head out of the city.

Basically we looked at all the fish, I took a bunch of pictures of the backs of my kids while they looked at all the fish, we had a picnic, then went to Cascade Locks for ice cream.  Then it started raining and we had a cool thunder storm.  Then it was very humid.

I don't even know why I'm writing about this; it wasn't really that interesting.  I won't let that stop me from posting pictures, though!  

(Great quote for the Bonneville tourist brochure: "It wasn't really that interesting.")

(It is fun, I promise.  Our kids love it there.)

first trip to the gorge and first time getting a diaper changed on a picnic table

In other summer news, I finally got started on my canning today.  And while everyone else in social media is posting pictures of their colorful and completed jars, I thought I would put a nice spin on things by posting photos of how my children's faces looked while I was working in the kitchen:

"doesn't anyone love me and want to snuggle me?"

"I pretty much hate my life."

No shots of Christian, but he was running around being a pill.  Throwing things down the stairs, stealing food and feeding it to Lola, yelling wild war cries; you can imagine, I'm sure.  I'm not worried, though, because I know they will love me this winter when they have food to eat.  (And they'll be like, "sheesh, Mom, you could've just bought this stuff from the store.)