Day trip to Northwest Trek. We all drive down (with Hiroko and Towa, too) to Eatonville for a visit to the Northwest Trek wildlife park. The weather’s warm, but in the shady forest it’s not too bad. Everyone likes the tram ride through the free-range area to see all the big animals (elk, bison, caribou, and so on), but it’s a mother raccoon with five kits that steal the show.
After lunch, we walk through the second half of the park. All the bears, wolves, big cats—pretty much everything on four legs—are napping. Jan says it should be called the “Naptime Zoo”. The beavers are up and about in their little pool, though, and one of them keeps coming back to watch Towa.
The other day Angela cut a peach open. The pit split, nothing new…except that instead of just a split pit, pouring out came 3/4 inch long, brown, complete with pincers…bugs! All over the fruit and crawling towards her hands! AAAAAAA!!!!! Anya & Liya wondered, “Why is Mommy screaming?” as she ran out the door and threw the peach halves outside.
We think they were European Earwigs. Ew.
Anya and Liya remembered that August is blackberry-picking season, so we got an early jump on picking berries this year. The last few years, we’ve only started late in the season, when the neighborhood brambles are picked over. Now we’ve got the opposite problem, and a lot of the berries aren’t ready yet. Still, the girls are having a good time. They’ve gone berry-picking four times in the past two days.
Jan, Anya, and Liya use the blackberries we’d picked to make a blackberry pie. It turns out great! Not too sour, not too sweet.
Angela is teaching Liya how to polish shoes and dreaming about child labor…
Tonight we took down the baby gate at the top of the main staircase—the last baby gate! The stairwell feels amazingly wide now.
Camping trip at The Dalles Campground, Day 1. Jan’s brother Chris, who arrived from San Francisco last night and spent the night at Lyn’s, comes by in the mid-morning. Jan makes a quick trip to the hardware store to pick up propane, and then we begin loading up the car. Even though we’re just going car camping for two nights, we still fill the back of Angela’s Highlander.
The four of us (Jan, Chris, Anya, and Liya) head out around 1:30 pm. The drive there is pleasant enough, and after the girls begin to get restless, we listen to an audiobook of “The Wide Window”, by Lemony Snicket. We get to The Dalles Campground a little after 3:00. Jan picked the campsite because it was: a) not hours and hours away, and b) available. It’s just a few miles outside the northeast corner of Mt. Rainier National Park. It’s sandwiched between the White River and a small highway, so there’s a bit of road noise, but otherwise it’s fine. Our campsite is pretty good: right next to a water faucet, and there’s a bathroom not too far away. We’re surrounded by huge old growth trees.
We start setting up the tent Jan borrowed from his friend Jalayne. It’s a huge eight person tent. (Or, as the girls like to say, a “forty baby tent!”) It takes us a while to figure out how to assemble it, but Jalayne and her husband have helpfully written instructions on the tent itself in permanent marker (why don’t tent companies do that?), so we eventually get it together. It’s great when it’s set up, and the girls are happy to hop in and out of it.
Before dinner we go for a short walk on a trail along the White River. There’s a 700 year-old tree at the head of the trail, and a bunch of the trees along the way don’t look much younger. We look for a way down to the river itself, but can’t find one. When the girls start to whine, we know it’s time to head back and start dinner.
None of our meals are particularly special by themselves, but camping makes them so. Dinner the first night is canned chili heated on the propane stove, and topped with some shredded cheese (a last-minute purchase at the general store on the way to the campground) it’s great. Dessert, of course, is s’mores. Anya and Liya enjoy toasting marshmallows and start to get the hang of where to place them so they brown but don’t burn.
Camping, Day 2. The girls thankfully sleep in a bit, and don’t start bouncing around the tent until around 9:00 am. We have a leisurely breakfast, and by the time we’ve cleaned up it’s nearly 11:00. We decide that, since we’re so close to Mt. Rainier, we should drive into the park and go hiking on the mountain itself.
Jan hasn’t visited Rainier since the girls were born because the girls are only good for a 2 mile hike or so, and that’s just not worth a 3 hour drive (both ways) no matter how spectacular the scenery is. Since we’re now just outside the park, though, it only takes us about an hour to drive all the way up to the Paradise Inn. We listen to more of “The Wide Window” on the way. (Jan and the girls love one line in particular in which the book discusses the three protagonists’ allergic reaction to peppermints: “If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.”) There’s a great view of the mountaintop along the way.
The park is pretty busy, since it’s a Saturday and the park is free today. Jan drops off Chris and the girls at Paradise, drives a long way down the valley road to find parking, then hikes all the way back up. Following an unremarkable lunch at the Inn, we head out for a short hike.
Although it’s a sunny day, halfway up the mountain here it’s foggy. We enjoy the walk through mist-covered alpine meadows carpeted with wildflowers. Our destination is Sluiskin Falls, which turns out to be just at the edge of how far the girls are willing to walk before turning up the whine volume. Every so often Chris and the girls play “Toll Both”, demanding imaginary money before they’ll let the others pass. This leads the girls to run farther and farther ahead (laughing all the way) so they can extract a toll from Uncle Chris.
The Falls themselves aren’t much to see from the trail, but we’re happy we’ve made it to our destination. The hike back down is thankfully quicker owing to a shortcut straight down to the road where the car is parked. In the parking area, we’re surprised to see a large fox wandering among the cars. (His tame behavior is explained when we see some tourists throwing him bits of junk food.)
We drive back and finish “The Wide Window” along the way. The girls ask for more Lemony Snicket books, which is a good sign. Dinner’s very simple—hot dogs, pickles, chips—but everyone eats plenty. We finish with s’mores again after dinner. Jan reads to the girls at bedtime: “Little House in the Big Woods”, an appropriate selection for our campout.
Camping, Day 3. We finally have a beautiful sunny day on our last day in the woods. After breakfast, the girls play a game with Uncle Chris they call “Angry Burglar” (a phrase they borrowed from “The Wide Window”). In the game, they get up on top of Angela’s car, and Chris slowly walks around the car trying to get them. They could play this game for hours.
When we’ve cleaned up from breakfast, we hike out of the campground and down a trail that runs along the White River through old growth forest. After about a mile, we come to a bridge crossing over the river. On the other side of the river, we find a place where we can scramble down to a tributary that feeds into the main river, and finally come out on a rocky shoal. We have fun throwing rocks into the river. Anya and Liya also discover that hurling a small rock at a big rock can make the small one break in two. Uncle Chris shows the girls how to balance a bunch of the smooth river-worn stones, and the girls happily make cairns for a while.
We hike back to the campsite and break camp. The big tent takes almost as much time to fold away as it did to set up! We pack everything back into the SUV and drive home.
U.S. Senator Patty Murray visits the Cozi office. Jan’s colleague Will helped orchestrate Cozi’s selection as a venue for a discussion of healthcare costs and their impact on small businesses. Cozi hosted a morning discussion between Senator Murray and a number of small business owners, including Jan’s partner Robbie. The employees gathered around the senator afterward for a group shot (she’s the woman in the brown suit in the middle). Most interesting thing Jan learned during the visit: Senator Murray used to be a preschool teacher!
This morning we had plans for brunch with our friends the Frazers who live on the other side of Madison Park. Since it was such a perfect sunny day, we rode our bikes there! Even Bree enjoyed it—we’ve now gone for enough rides this summer that Bree’s started to look forward to bike rides, and even ask for them. After the great brunch Megan had prepared, our two families had a nice trip up to the secret dock at the north end of the Park.
This morning a curious raccoon explores our backyard. Angela and the girls watch it from the windows in the dining room. It goes underneath the deck, then comes out, and eventually leaves the yard. At dinnertime, Sabriya is still pretty excited by the experience and shares the story with Jan. “Rattoon! Mommy rattoon! er… Unnerneath! Rattoon!”
Liya’s Sixth Birthday. Per Liya’s request, we threw her a “Mystery Treehouse Birthday Party”. Our week of preparation paid off in a fun party with some unique activities. Each of the eight guests started the party by climbing up the backyard treehouse to retrieve their own “detective kit”. Angela had found some great boxes with handles, and filled each one with: a pen, a pad of paper, a magnifying glass, a pair of binoculars, a secret code decoder, and a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat. The girls then used some cool paint pens to decorate their detective kits.
After this, Angela orchestrated a tag-style game of “Detectives and Robbers”. The highlight of this game was the use of the little court by the gardening shed as a jail. Some of the “robber” girls seemed to like being in this jail more than being free. After all the girls ran themselves ragged, they came inside for pizza. They got a look at the birthday cake Liya’s grandmother Lyn had made in the shape of a train—with a separate train car piece for each child—but the kids had work ahead of them before they could eat the cake.
For the party, Jan had scripted an intricate mystery called “The Birthday Burglar”, written in the macabre style of the “Series of Unfortunate Events” series by Lemony Snicket. In the story, an annoying girl crashes Liya’s birthday party and hides the birthday cake. The mystery mixed story chapters with movement through the house. (Angela made them all jump when one chapter described a loud scream, and at that moment Angela gave a very loud and very real scream.) The girls had to follow clues around the house and yard to solve the mystery of where the cake was hidden.
All the girls had fun using their secret code decoder to decrypt the clues. Most of the clues involved intentional misdirection that had the desired effect of surprising the girls with plot twists. Some clues were revealed to be more than they’d originally seemed. The final clue looked like a simple message in English, but turned out to actually be in secret code. Anya was ecstatic to be the first to catch on and decrypt the final clue before anyone else. She graciously agreed to be quiet so the other kids could play through the end of the mystery, and struggled mightily to keep from shouting out the answer. The birthday cake was eventually found and happily devoured.
The festivities continued even after the party, as Anya and Liya’s friends Jane and Kat invited the two over for an impromptu sleepover. Both Anya and Liya got to stay up late recounting events from the party.
Cozi had its annual picnic at Irongate Way Farm, home to Cozi colleague Sam Bergin and her husband Chris. Anya and Liya loved riding Sam’s pony, C.J., as usual. Sabriya spent virtually the entire afternoon in the bouncy house.