Memorial Day Weekend Recap

What a weekend! We left Seattle late Friday evening and headed south to Portland. After crashing at my parents house in Tigard, we had a very full day lined up on Saturday and Sunday. Missi had to work on Saturday but the kids and I got to head out to my grandfather's house in Scholls (after we had breakfast at Davidson's Restaurant - where I worked as a server and busboy 12 years ago!). After working in the garden at the farm, playing a game of Wiffle Ball, taking a tractor ride, and getting some lunch at the quaint "South Store," we headed off to swim at Tualatin Country Club. One of the biggest factors to making this an amazing weekend was the consistent 72 deg temperature and blue skies. The swimming was part of the birthday party for Missi's younger sister, Ella, who was celebrating her ninth birthday. After the kids had a BLAST swimming for a few hours, it was off to Maggie (my MiL) and Fred's house for a BBQ. Sunday was spent going to church at our old church, having a picnic with some of our closest friends, and then to Missi's grandfather's house for his birthday party. After a few hours with the "Hillier" side of the family we bundled the kids back into the car and headed north. What a whirlwind!






















And that was only Saturday and Sunday!!! Today we had a lazy breakfast, went for a bike ride around Mercer Slough, swimming with friends, dinner on the back deck, capped off by a great game of croquet with neighbors. To sum up this weekend, I pass along a thought that passed through my mind tonight: "This weekend was so great it almost seemed like it was out of a made-for-TV movie!"

Our beautiful five year old little lady

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Bring Your Child to Work Day

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to bring Drew to the office with me for our firm's "Bring Your Children to Work Day." The interesting thing about this is that, even though Drew just turned 9 years old, this is the first time he's had an opportunity to be part of an official "go to work with dad"-type event like this. I guess that's what happens when Dad has been in school for the past 3 years! But I digress...
The day started off with a bus ride into the city, which I think Drew enjoyed. The firm did an amazing job of scheduling out the day and planning a whole variety of activities for all of the kids to take part in. The theme of the day (which came from a larger national organization) was "Building Partnerships to Educate and Empower." Toward this goal, the kids were split up into three different "teams" and were tasked with planning a community service project that would require them to build partnerships. Interestingly enough, two of the three groups chose a service project related to helping animals and/or animal shelters in the community. When they weren't working with their teams to develop the service project, the kids also had some "computer training" time with our awesome IT trainer guy (this was actually just some Internet research on their chosen service project) and some "shadow" time with their parent or guardian. Drew and I also went to lunch in the Columbia tower, which is Seattle's tallest building and features a huge food court with about 15 different places to choose from (Drew chose pizza).

I'm not sure that Drew came away with any greater concept of what it actually is that I do for work, but I know that he had a good time and that's all that really matters, right?

A few pics from Easter

Here are a few pictures from an Easter egg hunt and cookie decorating party we attended at Sam's school, along with the requisite family photo from Easter brunch. You'll notice that we also brought one of Sam's best friends Kylie to the egg hunt. Kylie is a neighbor and the daughter of our great friends Andy and Shannon.

Mariners games

One of the things we were really looking forward to about moving to Seattle was the chance to attend Seattle Mariners games. Safeco Field is a great place to watch baseball and our whole family enjoys the sport. Fortunately my firm has a number of seats that they make available to employees, so we've already been able to attend a number of games this year. Here are a few photos from the game we went to with Drew and Missi's mom Maggie.

"Thank you for your patients"

Check out this latest occurrence of my pet peeve (misspelled words in public places)that was documented during last night's rain delay in the Washington Nationals baseball game. Obviously I wasn't actually at the game in DC, but I found out about this from reading this article. Classic!