The girls have about a month left until the end of the school year. Since this is the last year all three girls will be attending the same school, this is also the last month of getting all three ready for school at the same time. For posterity, here’s our current household morning routine:
6:00? Bree is usually the first person in the house to wake up. She reads, or builds something out of paper or Lego.
6:25 Jan gets up.
6:45 Liya’s alarm goes off, and she gets herself up.
6:55 Jan goes into Bree’s room to say hello and talk for a bit.
7:00 Anya likes an early warning that she’ll need to get up soon. Jan goes into Anya’s room and says, “Anya, it’s 7:00”, she stirs. Jan leaves Anya’s room, Anya goes back to sleep. Bree starts getting dressed.
7:01 Bree runs downstairs and out the front door, beating Jan to collect the morning New York Times.
7:02 Jan begins making tea, along with breakfast for him and Bree: cereal, yogurt, or a bagel. This particular week, Bree has been making herself open-faced toasted cheese sandwiches made with Beecher’s Flagship cheese.
7:05 Liya comes upstairs to make her own breakfast, typically a toaster waffle and a microwaved sausage.
7:15 Jan yells towards the second floor, “Anya, it’s 7:15!” Repeats as necessary. Anya eventually yells back, “Coming!”. At some point in the next 15 minutes, she will get dressed.
7:20 Jan, Bree, and Liya sit down to breakfast. Jan reads the paper. Bree finishes, then asks if she can check the Neko Atsume game on Jan’s phone to see how her virtual cats are doing. Liya finishes and continues working on some project she’s doing — at the moment, geometric origami shapes.
Angela comes downstairs to finish heating up Bree’s lunch and make Anya a fruit/vegetable smoothie. Anya no longer likes eating breakfast, so this is the only way we can get calories into her body before school.
7:26 Angela yells up to Anya to come downstairs.
7:30 Anya comes downstairs and begins playing piano.
7:35 Jan announces, “Okay, time to get ready to go!” Liya tries to finish up her work on her project. Bree is the first to start actually getting ready, retrieving her lunch from the kitchen counter and putting it in her school bag.
7:36 Anya comes into the kitchen to start making herself a lunch for school. Most common lunch choices: vegetable chili from a can (which she heats in the microwave and then transfers to an insulated container) or instant ramen.
7:38 Bree suddenly remembers some more things she needs for school — school library books, for example — necessitating at least one trip back upstairs.
7:39 Anya is somehow the first girl ready. She returns to playing piano.
7:40 Liya goes to the basement garage and waits in Jan’s car. Anya gets in the car, bringing the smoothie with her. Jan gives up waiting on the first floor for Bree, and gets in the car.
7:41 Angela helps Bree locate the final missing thing she needs for school.
7:42 Bree gets into the car. The garage door opens, and the four of them leave for school.
7:45 Angela begins making herself breakfast in the quiet house.
Anya begins a week-long school trip to England, starting with London.
Jan and Bree head to Olympic National Park for a weekend of backpacking along the coast. Last year, Jan hiked the northern stretch of the park’s coast with his friend Derek. This year, Jan wants to try the southern stretch south of La Push, WA.
The weather on the coast is notoriously rainy and windy, but the forecast for clear weather holds. After hiking 1.5 miles through the rainforest to get to the coast, we come to Third Beach. A number of rocky seastacks are visible to the south.
Whenever the beach comes to a headland that can’t be rounded, an overland trail scrambles up one side of the headland and down the other. These climbs can be very steep, and the various ropes or rickety ladders provided aren’t always confidence-inspiring. Bree decides these climbs are slightly scary, but also the funnest part of the trip.
Our camp for the first night is at Scott’s Creek, only about 3 miles from the trailhead (with lots of ups and downs). We have a great view from our site over the beach and the ocean. Dinner is rehydrated Chicken Fried Rice, which is actually pretty good.
Negotiating some rocks at low tide.
The beach is occasionally cluttered with flotsam, especially fishing nets and floats to hold fishing nets up. Someone’s rigged up a net into a hammock, which provides a nice spot to relax.
Sunset by Scott’s Creek
Saturday’s hiking takes us about 3 miles further south to Strawberry Bay. Although the park service discourages it, other campers have helpfully hung fishing net floats to mark out where the beachside forest hides good campsites. Since it’s early in the day, we managed to snag a great site.
Our site for Saturday night includes a lot of beach flotsam. As we tentatively poke around the site trying to decide whether to camp here, Bree finds a rope swing just the right height for her. She starts to swing on it and says, “I say, ‘Yes’!” So we pitch our tent. Previous campers have even left behind a folding chair and a table from something that washed up on shore.
After setting up camp, we leave behind most of our gear and do a short walk down the beach to our final goal for the day, Toleak Point. We spend a while playing by the creek that comes out of the forest there. Bree finds a tiny fishing net float, and makes a game out of throwing it into the creek, then waiting for the creek to carry the float down to a small plank bridge. Here the float can be seen on the left passing under driftwood logs.
Directly across from our campsite is a tower of rock that we can reach at low tide.
We manage to find a way through the jumble of boulders at the tower’s base, and climb a little ways up the tower. Some flowers, grasses, and a tree have managed to find purchase on the leeward side of the tower.
The flotsam table in our site makes a decent card table. Bree and Jan play many hands of Gin. Bree learned on a father-daughter trip last year, but is a much more confident player this year.
There are plenty of little tidepools to explore, with a variety of anemones, barnacles, and tiny crabs. Offshore, we manage to spot several seals swimming in the water. Their heads pop up out of the water and they stare at us.
Time to head home. Today we need to hike all the way to the Third Beach trailhead.
We stop for lunch on Third Beach. Despite the fact that the water’s freezing cold, Bree has fun playing at the water’s edge.
Lambie has been a solid hiking companion the entire trip.
Back at the Third Beach Trailhead! Bree hiked 6.5 miles today, including some crazy steep scrambles up and down the headlands. This year, she was able to carry her own pack (clothes, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, pillow, and personal gear) the entire way. She says this trip was even better than last year’s, and we both agree we should come back again.
Bree presents her poster on North Carolina to her class. Each 2nd grade student has to research and prepare a poster on a state, in preparation for an upcoming “State Convention” exhibit.
At that event, students stand by their poster and offer information about their chosen state. To solicit passersby, the students usually offer treats or food with some tie-in to their chosen state. Bree specifically chose North Carolina so that she could offer a snack which originated in that state: Krispy Kreme donuts.
Jan’s high school friend Peter and his partner James come to visit us for the weekend. Peter and James split their time between Florida and Ohio, and rarely get out to the West Coast, so it’s great to be able to host them. They’re passing back through Seattle after a week-long cruise to Alaska and back.
On their first evening in Seattle, we take them to an Escape-the-Room event at Puzzle Break Seattle. Our friends Bruce, Chris, and Laura join us, as do Peter’s friends Laurie and Pamela. We get permission from the event organizers to allow Bree to join as well.
The puzzle room is pretty fun, and we’re doing very well at the 45 minute mark. Angela and Bree have solved a maze, Jan’s solved a rebus, and Chris has solved what we think is the last puzzle. When we put a final piece into place, a secret door is revealed — opening onto a second room full of puzzles. We don’t manage to get through those in the remaining 15 minutes. But it’s still pretty fun.
Jan takes Peter and James for a walk through the Japanese Garden in the Arboretum. It’s a cool, gray day, so we’ve got the garden mostly to ourselves.
In the afternoon, Lyn comes to our house to watch the girls while we take Peter and James on a short trip up to Whidbey Island. We start with a drive up to Mt. Vernon, where we meet up with James’ cousin Diana. She lives just over the border in BC, and has driven down to see James. After spending a while there, Diana heads home, while we drive over to Deception Pass State Park. It’s raining a bit, so we don’t spend too much time out of the car, but it’s still beautiful.
Dinner is at the Inn at Langley, where we have a great — if somewhat surreal — modernist meal. Dessert includes a huge, melon-sized chocolate truffle that goes POOF! when sauce is poured on it, and some lipstick cases that, when turned, produce a vivid red, edible taffy.
We take Peter and James to Snoqualmie Falls and have a nice brunch in a small room at the Salish Lodge overlooking the falls.
Back at home, Liya and Bree take everyone through a Squishable (stuffed animal) exhibition of origami and paper crafts they’ve put together.
Some of the paper crafts in the exhibition, most folded by Liya.
In the early morning, we say goodbye to Peter and James as they head back to Florida.
The weather finally clears, and we have a sunny afternoon and evening. The Tippett family joins us for a salmon barbecue dinner.