Family Time

We left for our family vacation to Lake Chelan on Saturday, and stopped in Leavenworth on the way. For those of you not from Washington, Leavenworth is a cute little Bavarian city in the mountains (supposedly similar to Frankenmouth in Michigan, but better, with mountains...). The picture on my last post of Evangeline and I with shark and dolphin hats is from a hat shop there. Here are some more:

This is the house we stayed at in Chelan

Here is the view from the backyard

The house wasn't in town or anywhere near town.... it was about a 15-20 drive away that included some very windy and hilly roads, and a long steep gravel road as well. But it was a beautiful big house with amazing views of the surrounding hills, orchards, vineyards, and the lake below. We also had our own pool and hot tub, wrap around deck, rose garden, and green grassy yard. More pictures to come of what we did while we were there :).

A Wedding and a Fire

We've been having a wonderful time on vacation so far. I just wish it could be even longer so I could see more people and not go back to work as soon. It's been so nice to spend time with my family and especially, baby Evangeline :).

My first two nights here I had baby showers to go to. Friday we got to spend most of the day watching the baby. Then Friday night we went to Rachel Visser's wedding at the Shilshole Bay Beach Club. After we pulled into the parking lot, we heard a pop and across the street from the entrance and a car had started on fire. It took quite a while for the fire department to get there, and the nice looking truck in front of it was also engulfed in flames by the time they came and put it out.

I love her!

A Little Bit of Everything

Here are a few pictures that I took last week in our backyard and never got the chance to post:

Our wonderful deck without a hole in it.

My hammock that I can hardly go in because of the darn evil
mosquitoes that eat me alive whenever I go out there.

One of the two random and beautiful lily
plants in the middle of our meadow.

It's huge!

Our very own wild black raspberries :)

It's been a long and tiring week. Not bad necessarily, but I am certainly glad that it's the weekend and that I only have to work 2 days next week before I'm officially on vacation :). Monday night my aunt and uncle, Judy and Larry, took Matt and I and my cousin Autumn and her boyfriend out to dinner. That was a good time, and we went back to their house (or summer house more like, their real home is in Washington) in Hudsonville for dessert. But we got home really late from there, so Tuesday night I went to bed super early.

Oh, over the weekend at work the carpet in my room had to be removed because the water kept coming back, so we had to be in the preschool again with our kids. Then we were back in there Tuesday, and back in the preschool Wednesday while new carpet was being put in... so it's been a crazy week at work and it's extra hard to get things done when we've been kicked out of our room so much. It's looking like I am going to miss the accreditation visit while I'm on vacation. The 15 day window for them to come started on Monday, but they haven't called with our 24-hour notice yet, so it won't be this Monday either. And if they don't call for Tuesday, I'll be gone! That makes me glad and feel a little bad at the same time. I really don't want to be there and have to remember to do everything exactly right and get observed, but i also know things would go smoother with our kids if I was there and so I feel bad for getting out of it.

On Thursday I babysat and brought the kids to a splash pad/water playground. Apparently Grand Rapids has all kinds of these and wading pools and full sized outdoor pools to go to for free or very cheap. That's a really cool thing for lower income families (especially because most are at parks, several of which are in urban areas), and anyone for that matter with our economy right now, to be able to go to. Then we got ice cream, because what little kid (or me) doesn't want some ice cream after a hot afternoon in the sun? Here are a few pics:

This morning we woke up at 9:30 and our power was out! I wasn't planning on sleeping quite that late, but it wasn't my fault ;). It looked like it went out around 8 am, and it was wet out, but not stormy, so we're not sure what happened. Anyways, it was a lazy dark morning with no power, until 11:30 when it came back on :-P. We did pick more black raspberries... I think we have 3 sandwich sized ziplocs full now. We're picking them little by little and freezing them until we have enough to make something.

I'm not sure if I'll have time to post again before we leave, but Tuesday after work, we're eating dinner, then driving to Matt's parents in Indiana. Then our flight leaves out of Chicago early Wednesday morning and we arrive in Seattle late that morning, hurray!! I'll try to keep posting while I'm there, but no promises. Only 4 more days!!! I can't wait :-D.

EDIT: Here's a new picture of the lilies that I took today...

More fireflies...

I am hoping this video is not as dark as the other one. Also, don't miss the extremely long post from a few hours ago that is right below this :).

Fun on the 4th

Friday morning Matt, Grace, and I enjoyed some coffee and breakfast (Grace had spent the night), then headed to a bike trail for a 16 mile bike ride. I have found so many good trails around here lately. And we just got a bike rack as a joint anniversary gift, so we can go on a lot more of them now. This one we drove a couple miles to, then hopped on in the middle and headed one direction to end up at a park, then turned around and came back. The other direction goes by the Grand River and to some more parks and the zoo on the other side of the river. The whole thing is about 14 miles though, so that round trip would be a bit much. We'll have to work ourselves up to that. Anyways, here are some pics (notice how I am sporting my new hydration backpack that I got for my birthday... I LOVE it! I can drink water while riding my bike, and it stays nice and cool in there too)...

The three of us at Douglas Walker Park.

My helmet is very lopsided...

Soon after we got back from the bike ride, our friend Andrea (who was in town for a wedding) stopped by to see us for a little bit. It's always fun to see friends you haven't seen in a while (since our wedding)! We grilled up some burgers and chowed down on watermelon and chips and guacamole... it was a great summery sort of afternoon! That night we went to hangout with Matt's aunt and uncle and cousins at Sandy Pines, which is a summer trailer park/resort sort of place on a lake where everyone gets around on golf carts. It's about 30 min from our house. We chatted, played some beach volleyball, got some more bug bites, and watched the fireworks over the lake :).

Here is a picture of Matt and I right before the fireworks.

On Wednesday of this past week, we had a big storm with tons and tons of rain. I don't think I've ever seen it rain so much and hard in such a short time in my life, you could barely see across the street at several points. The news said that we got about 4 inches in like 12 hours, and they got more like 6 inches a little bit south of us. They also said that 6 inches is a hurricane amount of rain! Anyways, there was a lot of flooding and power outages and trees down and such in our area. We fared pretty well, but we did get a little bit of water in one corner in the basement that we think came in through the chimney :-/.

On my drive to work on Thursday morning, the streets were a mess with leaves and branches and dirt that had been washed onto them. I was the second person to get to our daycare, and the girl who opened ran out to my car to tell me that our entire basement had flooded! The infant and toddler rooms are down there and the tile had puddles all over it and the carpet was so wet that a pool formed around your foot when you stepped on it. We couldn't get ahold of our director, so we had to decide quickly how to deal with the situation. We ended up calling all the infant's parents and telling them their room was closed and they could not come in, and we moved the toddlers upstairs to join the preschool room. Then I spent the morning mopping the floors, moving stuff off of the carpets, dragging rugs outside to dry, opening windows, turning fans on, and setting anything else that got wet out to dry. We guessed that there had been 3-4 inches of standing water down there at one point! Anyways, it was a crazy day, and our director did finally get back to us and came in after 1.5-2 hours. I felt bad because she had to spend the entire day sucking water out of the carpets. There was also a trench in the wood chips on our playground where a river of water had washed through. It was 2-3 feet wide!

One final note.... Evangeline is 2 months old today!! And I get to see her in 11 days!! Here are a couple of pics of her in the wading pool at Greenlake.

Capturing Fireflies

My title refers to both the actual capturing of fireflies and capturing them on film. Dustin requested pictures or videos of them after my last post... and let me tell you, this is no easy task. The story I told about seeing hundreds of them on the side of the road was partially so amazing because there were so many. In one's own yard, they are much more sporadic and it's not very likely that there will be more than one or two lit up at the same exact moment. Not to mention that when I go out into my yard in attempts to capture the moment with my camera, I tend to scare them away. After several attempts, however, I managed to get a decent video of them in my neighbors yard, although for some reason it's much darker on here than the actual video is on my computer.



Now about actually capturing them. I've seen people in movies chasing fireflies with nets and trying to catch them to put them in a glass jar to look at, but it never occurred to me that I could actually do that. Last night Matt informed me otherwise as he appeared with a plastic grocery bag strung around an unbent metal hanger, with a stick taped to the hanger as a handle. Then he went frolicking into the front yard and actually caught one! I was amazed! So yes, we put it in a glass jar to look at. It wouldn't light up for us though anymore last night. I got it to a little bit this morning, as you can see in the following pictures, but it was also starting to die by that point.

Here the little guy is glowing, but it's hard to
tell in the daylight, and because it's so blurry...

Here he isn't glowing, but it's a much better picture of him :).