"And when you want to go explore...

...the number you should have is four."  -Sandra Boynton

I'll let Eve tell this story:

In case the kid-writing is hard to decipher, here's the text:

"Dear, Mommy
I hop you hav a good day. I am ver ecsited abowt the noborn baby. I love you Mommy!
wat? wen is the baby going to be born?"

The answer to her final question is May 28, give or take a couple of weeks.  :-)

Fall pictorial roundup

Aaaaand we're back.  A lot has been happening, so I will try to sum up with photos.

 Grandma Bernadine came out to visit us for two weeks in early October.  It was the first time she'd visited us! It was very exciting.  At one point we and two of Brian's sisters took her on a day trip to Astoria, and thence to the beach.  It was the first time she had ever really seen the ocean, and lamely, I did not take any pictures of that momentous occasion.

Eve with Daddy on top of the Astoria Column.

On to Halloween.  Eve had been requesting for a full year that she go as a lamb, and I go as Little Bo Peep.  For once, I was happy to indulge her costume fantasies.

Thanksgiving!  Isaiah is in preschool three mornings a week, and boy, do they crank out some great crafts!  This turkey hat was one of their best pieces of work:

Also in honor of Thanksgiving, there is a tradition at Eve's school that the first-graders put on a simple Thanksgiving play.  The most challenging role is that of the narrator, who has to read about three times as much text as rest of the group combined.  Guess who got picked?

Eve, narrating while in pilgrim woman costume.  She rocked it. 

And that sums up our autumn, except for one other item I'll cover in my next post.

A handful of belated summer pictures

Brian took these pictures with his phone, which is why they weren't included previously.  I hear that Grandma Kluge in particular has been wanting to see the photos of Samuel doing his Samuel thing with Grandpa's birthday Mississippi Mud Cake.

 Face painting at the school carnival

Eeeep. Eeeep. Eeeep. Unauthorized intruder alert.

 Who needs forks when you've got a spatula?

He does this sort of thing a lot.  Last week he carefully carried the remnants of a pear crisp over to the table, where he sat down and proceeded to dig in before being busted by Mommy.  You'd think he'd just eat wherever he found the food, but no, one must maintain *standards*.

Infinity beach

We spent this past weekend at a rented beach house in Ocean Park, smack in the middle of Washington's Long Beach peninsula. The name of the peninsula is apt, because the beach in question is 28 uninterrupted miles long.  From where we stayed, you could walk for a day in either direction and not reach the end.

I've always enjoyed the beach; as a teenager, I promised myself that I would never live more than a few hours drive away from the ocean.  I just liked knowing it was there if I needed it.  This particular beach vacation affected me somewhat strangely.  To begin with, I was amazed at how relaxing it was, in spite of still having to prepare meals and dress/referee/discipline/clean up after the children.  And then wow, that beach...  I'd walk out onto it and it was as if I'd stepped outside space and time.  If I looked straight ahead, I could see the sea and the slight curve of the earth.  If I looked to the right: empty flat sandy beach disappearing into a sea-mist horizon.  To the right: same view as to the left.  I felt swallowed up by it, and even when I tried, I couldn't put together any coherent practical thoughts.  I just *was*.  I moved and spoke and attended to the kids, but none of it touched me.  I've struggled since then to think of a short, sound-bite way to describe it (I considered "nirvana" but rejected it on philosophical principles), and the closest thing I could come up with was that it was an experience of infinity.

“The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.
It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.” -Douglas Adams

Exactly.  Illusory or no, it was a lovely experience, the weather surprised me by being beautiful, and I will now post more pictures that I ought to.

 The kids had more fun sliding down the dunes than doing just about anything else.

 On the path to the house

The main living area of our rental house

 The view from the house

 On a beach this big, you don't get much company.

 Eve really got into sand-castle making.

 Samuel, making a zen garden?

Hot hot hot

Early September weather in the Pacific Northwest is always a toss-up. Sme years it is hot and dry, some years it is cool and dry, and some years it is cool and rainy.  This is one of the hot and dry years, for which I am profoundly thankful.  With any luck, my tomatoes and grapes will actually have a chance to finish ripening before the cooler fall weather shuts things down.

On a related note, we have peppers.  LOTS of peppers.  My two bell pepper plants are ripening at once just like they always do (why can't they space themselves out a little more?), and we have five plants of jalapeño peppers that are loaded down with ripe fruit, plus two Serrano pepper plants in the same condition.  The cayenne peppers aren't quite ripe yet, and the two habanero plants are definitely not ripe yet.  But those jalapeños, whew!  Last year, for reasons that could not be fully determined, all of my jalapeños were utterly mild.  I had bought the packaged labeled Hot!, but I now suspect it might have been mislabeled.  I soldiered on and tried again this year with seeds bought from another source and goodness gracious heavens to Mergatroyd, these jalapeños are volcanic.  I put five mostly seeded *slices* in a pot of tomato soup last night and it was almost too hot for me to comfortably eat. Now to find more uses for all this hotness. :-)

Beginning of school, end of summer

Eve's first day of first grade was a half day ending at noon, so we drove a few minutes further south and had a picnic lunch on the banks of the Columbia River.

 Still in uniform

 Gazing

 Boy, it was a good day for a beach picnic.

A few days later, Brian scored a used kids' pool for cheap.  Thank goodness the warm weather is holding.

 Eve, practicing her swimming moves.

I agree, Samuel:  pools are awesome. Thank you, Daddy!

This one's for Brian

That's not a carrot.

THIS is a carrot.

....  [insert witty comment here, I'm at a loss]

I'd never seen this before, but since I took that picture I've found another pair of conjoined tomato-twins on my Sungold plant.  Nature is fun.