BTW - I Voted

And you should too. Just in case you haven't had enough reminders already! We live in an area where voting by mail is very easy, which is very convenient. Even if you don't...just do it! If you don't have any idea how to vote on a particular item, you can still weigh in on those things that matter to you, and just leave those things that you're clueless about blank.

Scarecrow Festival

I was looking forward to this, because the location (Sehmel Homestead Park) and the theme both sounded really good to me. It turned out to be a rainy day, but nevertheless, we managed to have a good deal of fun. The Scarecrow Festival was a little light on scarecrows and a tiny bit heavy on a few companies advertising by offering their services for free, but the most important word in this sentence - at least so far as my broke-as-all-get-out family is concerned - is "free." It was that lovely sort of event where several very fun hours could pass without the kids whining at all about how they weren't getting to do X-thing-that-would-be-fun-but-costs-too-much. In fact, I brought cash along figuring that I'd have to pay for SOMETHING, but the laser tag, bounce houses/slides, and a modest amount of candy were all free.

Papa Visit, Rainier, Boy-Trip Failure

This past week, we attempted to send Boyness to Hawaii. Not so far-fetched given that my whole family lives there, and my dad - who works for an airline - came for a visit and was going to bring Boyness home with him. The flight loads were all kinds of fucked up, though. Much guilt on the part of his parents (us) and his Papa. Much conciliatory "what do you want to do today?" activity. We'll be trying again in a few weeks, but will be waiting for optimally low flight loads - the main reason for this timing was that my dad was on the mainland already, not that the flights were particularly clear.

Browsing the toy stores - Boyness' choice of things-to-do on Friday afternoon - resulted in a whole lot of "I want" action. My convenient pass-phrase out of the whining became "OK, put it on your wish list!" Since Boyness is literate and able to go online (given how easy this is for him, I think the bar is set pretty low these days wrt what you can type into a search bar and still get a relevant result), he is now the proud owner of an Amazon Wish List: http://amzn.com/w/XE8G4HS2DBFH He begged me to share it, so there it is.

Well. So. Papa was supposed to stay for just a day, but due to overfull airplanes, wound up here for a bit longer, which we are extremely happy about. We don't see enough of my family.

The weather has pretty much been glorious all week. (Yesterday, in fact, managed to outdo every other day somehow and be *perfect*.) On Thursday, flights were so snarled that we gave up any pretense of trying to get anyone on an airplane, and we headed up to Mount Rainier National Park. I picked a hike that seemed pretty tame, one that we had already done the first little bit of a few times in the past. The elevation gain, however, turned out to be brutal, and the 2.7m each way turned into a 5 hour hike. BittyPrincess very seriously informed us, about 1/4 mile from finishing the hike, that she thought she was going to die. The hike was gorgeous; we started by crossing the Nisqually river, and then saw Carter and Madcap falls along the way before reaching our turn-around point at Narada Falls.















In the meantime, Francesco worked on his birthday - again - and then we went out to eat at like 9pm on a friday night, and it was a little crowded and loud, which isn't really our thing.

We've been feeding Chubble random bits of food from our meals, with great (highly excited happy non-choking baby) success. I realized as I gave her some rice with a little gravy on it that she is SUCH a fourth child, not that we were ever that particular type of parent that blends food and carefully feeds four meals a day spoon by spoon.