I love that our Christmas tree tells a story about our family! Each year we pick up one ornament from some big event in the year (usually a vacation.) This year our big trip was to Maine and Indiana. We didn’t find ornaments that really seemed to fit so I made one on the laser cutter. I think it’s a little big so I might make a smaller one next year, but this is a good reminder of our fun summer.
When I was young, I remember going to see the Harlem Globetrotters and being amazed at the show. I’ve watched their tour schedule for the past couple years and they finally came to the Seattle area. Tickets were reasonable so we snagged three of them.
Elijah had a great time and the show was very entertaining. I wouldn’t want to go every time they come to town, but we all agreed it was worth seeing them. They added a “four point line” a few years ago. It’s 30 feet from the hoop. That’s more than 6 feet beyond the NBA line! I wish I had kept track of their average but at one point, one guy made SEVEN IN A ROW. I was equally impressed by how smoothly they all worked together to put on the show while also appearing to enjoy enjoying it even though they do the exact same stuff every day.
One of Elijah’s favorite things to listen to in the car is a podcast called Wow in the World. It’s a science show aimed at kids, and they recently brought their live show to Seattle. We snagged some tickets and headed to Benaroya Hall in Seattle.
We were up in the second balcony, but we had a great view of the stage and enjoyed the show. I think Elijah had a lot of fun seeing the people behind the voices live and in person.
As the parent of a six year old and a lover of both Star Wars and the Avengers, signing up for Disney+ was a no-brainer. I jumped on an early deal and pre-paid for 3 years of the service so we’re on board whether it’s good or not. The only hiccup I’ve had so far came on launch day when the app was overloaded, but since then the reliability has been great.
As I sat on the couch last Friday watching Jungle Book with the family, I kept wondering what my 10 year old self would have thought if it could have seen me watching Jungle Book on a 10 foot screen in my own house without any tapes or discs in a player as it is controlled via my phone.
I’ve seen some comments about various movies that aren’t on the service, but it’s a treat to scroll through the list of what IS on the service. You know how you scroll through Netflix or Hulu and you’ve never heard of most of it? Not so with Disney+. It’s hit after hit after hit. No more frustrating “Disney vault”. It’s all there at your fingertips.
Over the past few years, I’ve felt the Disney brand rising up the list in my head. They’re becoming synonymous with a high quality but sometimes pricey product. Thankfully Disney+ only gets the first part of that. The cost is $6.99/month with cheaper options if you pay ahead. That’s crazy low when you compare it to other services.
It’s pumpkin patch season and pumpkin patches are big business. The grandaddy of them all is Remlinger Farms where you’ll pay $25/person for the privilege of walking in. We’ve been going to Bob’s Corn for quite a while but it has gotten busier and busier until this year they jumped on the admission train and it’s $18/person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see them doing well and yay capitalism, but we decided it was time to move on to a place that wasn’t overwhelmed with mustachioed hipsters from Seattle.
So this year we headed a bit farther north to the Bailey Family Farm. They have a really nice (but small and not too crowded) set up with everything we were looking for. We met up with some other friends there and had a nice morning. I think we’ll be heading back again, and since it’s pretty close to the route that Tyla and Elijah drive every day for school, we might end up using their veggie stand in the future.
I posted earlier about our trip to Maine but that was only the first half of our summer vacation. From Maine, we drove back to Boston and then flew to Midway where Dad picked us up and took us back to Indiana.We spent just over a week there and had incredible weather! We went in the pool every day (often twice a day), visited the dunes, played putt putt, rode tractors and generally filled our time with lots of smiles and good food.
One big difference on this trip was that Don joined us for the second half of our time there. It was fun to finally show him where I grew up and Elijah loved having both Grandpa’s at the house at the same time!
I put together a video for this part of the trip as well and there are a couple family photos below.
If you search this blog for posts about “Camp Ticawa”, you’ll find a lot of entries. When I lived on the east coast, I frequently had the pleasure of hanging out with the Abendroth family at their place on Long Lake near Harrison, Maine.
Since moving to Washington, the trips have become a lot less frequently. Tyla and I made it out there in 2011 and this year, we decided it was time to go back. Luckily the Abendroth clan was cool with us inviting ourselves out to invade their family vacation!
Getting to rural Maine from Woodinville with a 6 year old in tow isn’t easy. There weren’t any great options, but I think we ended up with a good one. Don was kind enough to get us to the airport by about 4:30am for a very early flight out of Seattle all the way to Boston. There we rented a car and made the ~3.5 hour drive up to camp. After factoring in the time change, we arrived around sunset.
We were blessed with beautiful weather all three days that we were there and we spent it floating down the Saco River, tooling around the lake on the pontoon boat, and relaxing around camp. It was great to catch up with old friends and meet a couple new faces as well. I can’t say enough thank you’s to the entire Abendroth family for letting us crash their family time! You all made us feel so welcome and we will cherish those memories forever!
Apparently, Jay had been passing around the old videos I made of camp and I was immediately asked by a number of the kids to make another one. So here we go! It’s the 2019 Camp Ticawa montage video:
Back in 2011, Tyla and I went to a sled dog race near Lake Wenatchee with Tim and Chelsea. That’s the only time I’ve been near Lake Wenatchee State Park, but a couple weekends ago, we went back with Elijah and Tyla’s family to camp at the state park.
As the name implies, Lake Wenatchee State Park sits right on the lake. We booked pretty late (only seven months in advance!) so we got the runt of the litter for campsites but they ended up being pretty nice. We were warned in advance about bugs by numerous internet reviews but thankfully we hardly saw any.
This was our first camping trip trying to sleep on cots instead of air mattresses. Tim and Chelsea loaned us two normal sized cots and I bought an ogre sized cot for myself. I think we might add a thin pad or air mattress on top of them in the future but they worked great! They take up the same space as our air mattresses did but it opens up all the space below the cots for our bags so it is a lot easier to navigate the tent.
Last night just before 3am all three of us woke up to the house shaking. It was bad enough that it even woke up Elijah (“Mommy! Daddy! What’s happening?!”), but it wasn’t bad enough to shake anything off the walls or make it difficult to move. Tyla got Elijah back to sleep pretty quickly and after walking around the house to look for any damage, I hopped online to see how bad it was. As I sat down there was a smaller aftershock.
Within a few minutes, the quake information was available on the USGS website and I had a notification in my inbox. If you’re not familiar with that site and you live in an earthquake zone, I recommend you spend some time there. Here’s the page for the main quake last night which was a 4.6 and both it and the 3.5 aftershock were between Lake Stevens and Monroe (less than a 30 minute drive from my house). They were 25-30km deep and lasted 10-15 seconds.
Not only does that site get very quick assessment of the intensity of the quake but you can also fill out a quick survey to help them assess the potential damage. Strangely it looks like their notification service page is broken right now, but when it’s working, you can set your own alert levels. So for example, I get an email alert whenever anything bigger than 2 hits the Pacific Northwest and anything bigger than 5 hits the west coast. Check back on the site later and look for the Earthquake Notification Service.
So that site gave me some instant calm as I realized it was a pretty mild earthquake and then Twitter helped some as I didn’t see any reports of damage or injuries. After about 45 minutes, the TV stations finally started picking it up. Kiro 7 had a story about how the newscaster’s teenage son was up watching TV and he said their cat sensed it before it happened…
We haven’t found any damage around here and none of us are hurt. So after the gallons of adrenaline that instantly flooded our system finally wore off, we were able to go back to sleep.
I’ve set a time-consuming precedent by making a montage video for every year of Elijah’s life. I got a very late start this time and there were over 1200 videos to dig through and cut down. You can find the 6th year video embedded below or head over to YouTube to see a playlist of all the videos. Happy birthday big man!
