Oregon Coast in March

We took a trip to the coast over Spring Break and enjoyed
the beauty of Oregon's coastal spring weather. 

In other words, it was cold and wet. 

Actually, there were some spells of dry weather.

We made sure those were the times we were outside exploring. 

Otherwise, we planned to just get wet or stay inside. 

We enjoyed beautiful scenery...

...and played on beautiful beaches.

We hid in driftwood fortresses...

and stood among the towering beauty of a lighthouse.

We made friends with sea creatures....

and watched sea lions stake their claim on a dock in the bay.

It was a weekend filled with new adventures and fun times. 

I even got brave enough to try my first meal of fish tacos.  They were delicious!

But, I would only attempt such a meal at the coast in a restaurant where the seafood is fresh. 

We had a great time.  It will be nice to go back when the weather is warmer.

Rice cereal

What do you do with a huge pot of leftover rice?  Make rice cereal, of course!

This is a gourmet dish straight from the farmlands of Idaho where my mom and dad grew up.  My mom would make this for us occasionally--sometimes for breakfast and sometimes for dinner.  I have fond memories of it.  It's quite simple.  Just leftover rice, milk, cinnamon, honey or sugar to sweeten, warmed and served.

Why, then, do I hear such weeping and wailing from my kids when they see it's for dinner?  Spoiled.  That's what they are.

Randomnicity

I'm not a bed-blanket-hog, but the blankets always end up falling off my side of the bed. 

We only use our wood-burning fireplace insert to heat our house.

My nose is almost always cold.  (I'm not sure if there exists a correlation between this and the fact above.)

My three-year-old, Karina, has nebulous ideas about "storage."  She hears about her old toys being in "storage" or her seasonal clothes going into "storage."  For awhile I think she thought "storage" was some far away place, which was convenient when she wanted to get something out of "storage" and didn't realize it was just a bunch of boxes in the garage.  But now she's realizing Mom goes into the garage to get things out of "storage" so I think the mystery is beginning to unfold.

Yesterday one of the other kids asked Karina where their prized toy was that she happened to be playing with earlier.  With a sly look on her face she said, "I don't know.  I put it in storage."

I do all the laundry on one day of the week--Monday. 

My kids think dried fruit is a treat, like candy.  Let's keep it that way.

I'm always the person who takes out the trash.  Everyone else will just keep shoving, pushing, and packing it down until it's spilling out of the can all over the floor.  They'll spend more time trying to get the garbage to stay in the can than if they would just empty the bag!

Today, for the first time in my life, I saw it snowing outside while it was sunny.  Strange.

Every Sunday after church, our family tradition is to eat pasta (usually made by Jason).  Yum!

Jason has more shoes and clothes in the closet than I do.

I didn't find out the gender of any of our babies was before they were born.  I like suprises way too much. 

Jason did find out the gender of each of our babies and kept it a secret from everyone--even his own mother.  Now that's a good secret-keeper!

My kids crank up the music loudly in our house.  Then they run around with their shirts off, dancing, wrestling, jumping, or whatever the music makes them feel like doing.  I'm pretty sure the neighbors can hear them and they probably think we're wacko.

A sweet center core

I've come across a few things Grant has written lately that illustrate he truly has a sweet center core, even though lately he's rather prickly.

A note written to Mariah:

Deer Mriyu (Mariah)
I like you bekus you play with me


A letter he wrote for a school assignment:

Dear Dalln,  I theeinc you are nis to me.  I wont (want) you to play the xbox three sixd with me.


I love his creative spelling.  And I love his thoughtfulness even though he doesn't show it often. 

Power outage

Sunday afternoon we had a crazy squall or storm or something come through our town and tear it up.  It was wild!  Trees were down everywhere and, consequently, our power went out.  So we had a fun afternoon and evening entertaining ourselves with no electricity. 

We built a rip-roaring fire in our fireplace.

We checked the news on our cell phones to see how widespread the storm was.  Pretty much our whole town was out of electricity (plus a lot more people around the county).

We laughed at Karina as she tried to turn on the lights.

Mariah painted Karina's toenails in the dark with a reading light.  She's multi-talented like that.

We played board games and pictionary.

We napped in front of the fireplace.  Or at least we tried to nap while the kids mawled us to death on the floor.

We shined flashlights in our faces and told ghost stories to creep out the kids.

We laughed at Kyle as he tried to turn on the fan.

We heated up water and milk on the fireplace and made hot chocolate.

After about five hours, we listened to our neighbors fire up generators for their houses. 

We lit candles around the house to light our way.

We held relay races up and down the hallway.  Jason told the kids as he winked at me, "You know, if Mommy and Daddy didn't have all you kids, we wouldn't be running relay races in the dark." 

We debated if school would happen in the morning if the power wasn't back on.

We got on each other's nerves.

We ate chips and salsa and leftover Taco Bell for dinner (which we reheated on our fireplace).  Jason gloated, "I bet no one else in Estacada is having Taco Bell for dinner tonight!"

We pondered the pioneers and the biblical advice of "Early to bed, early to rise..."

We went to bed early because....what else is there to do?

Nationality

Mariah and I were discussing the nuclear disaster currently taking place in Japan.  I was explaining to her the worsening situation for the people over there and she said,

"You better get outta there, Japans.....Japanians....I mean, Japanese."

Busy busy

Karina has been very busy lately.  She has found a new passion for coloring and writing.  Several times a day I find her intensely filling sheets of paper with scribbles and markings.  It's very serious business.  She started out with works such as this:

But, she's moved on to finer, more detailed work in the past few days. 

I find these "artworks" scattered throughout the house on a daily basis.  I love how you can see the way her brain is developing by what she takes interest in.  Growing up is serious stuff!

???

Are they stranded in the forest?

Is there hot lava surrounding their Jeep and they can't get off?

Are Storm Troopers attacking and they're warding them off with their Star Wars guns?

Is it a contest to see how many kids can fit in a Jeep?

Maybe they're foreign nationals trying to make it across the border.

Are they four-wheeling and stuck in a pit of mud?

I'm not sure what they were doing, but at least they were having fun.

Adventures in Snow

We woke up on Monday to a morning of pouring rain.  As I loaded the kids in the car to take them to school I said, "Wouldn't this be awesome if all this rain were snow?"  I came back home, hopped in the shower, and when I came out and looked out my bedroom window, guess what I saw?  SNOW!!!!  Woohoo!

If you don't know already, snow makes me very, very happy.  I get giddy, like a little kid.  I just love it.  And I needed something to pick me up that morning, since I was feeling crummy to begin with. 

Well, the snow didn't show signs of letting up, so the school closed early.  I picked up the kids and we headed up the road to drive around and have some fun.  The picture below shows how fast the snow came down.  At 9:00am, it was raining.  By 1:00pm, it looked like this. 

We drove along the road and enjoyed the beautiful scenery around us. And.....this may or may not be our car stuck in the ditch. Oops!

And, I may or may not have had to call my dad to pull said car out of the ditch. Sometimes it's nice to remind our parents their still useful to their children.  Love you, Dad!