A Fifth Birthday

Sydney got three birthday "parties" this year: first with just her household, then with all her school friends at Papa's Pizza (next year, I'm taking a giant bag of earplugs for the adults), and finally this one with her extended family. Here she attacks her candle while Daddy holds the cake and Bug looks on.

Sydney was quite gracious about letting Isaac have some time with some of her new acquirements. This soft dog was a favorite. Terrie points out that the dog was actually Isaac's Valentine gift. (Thanks!)

I recently returned from a trip to the Philippines. The quick summary:

Outbound:

Portland to Tokyo: 11 hours on airplane
Tokyo to Manila: 5 hours on airplane
Manila: overnight at Shalom guest house
Manila to Bagui: 6 hours on bus
Baguio: overnight at St Elizabeth guest house
Baguio to Sagada: 7 hours on bus

The payoff:

Sagada, Besao, Bontoc: 3 nights

Return:

Besao to Baguio: 8 hours on bus
Baguio: overnight at St Elizabeth guest house
Baguio to Manila: 6 hours on bus
Manila: overnight at Shalom guest house
Manila to Tokyo: 4 hours on airplane
Tokyo to Portland: 9 hours on airplane
Portland to Hillsboro: 2 hours on light rail

Terrie and the kids decided to skip this one :-)

I'm hoping to write up something more interesting from this trip, but I
wanted to put something down to mark the occasion.

Hope everyone's doing well!

Elk Mountain Weather Report

Here's the weather report from Elk Mountain.

With a basket of cash, I'd ....

Sydney's birthday is coming up, and she's been angling for it to be at the "jump house", one of those places that's all inflatable slides and houses and stuff to play on. Several of her friends have done this for their parties. We had explained that it was too expensive and we were not going to pay that much money for a birthday party.

Then she saw the latest Consumer Reports which has a waste basket full of $$$$ on the cover. She pointed to it and asked "Mom, would you like to have this"? Terrie of course said "Yes". She answered "Then I would be able to have a party at the jump house"!!

She seems to have a pretty good grasp on the concept of money ....

Glow Golf

Sydney and Isaac both had a blast at indoor glow-in-the-dark miniature golf! I think Isaac's favorite part was the boxes where you fed the ball through to recharge their glow. The pictures are pretty fuzzy because I left the flash off in order to capture the ambiance.

Language Arts

I'm enjoying Sydney's experimentations with language. There was the phase of adding "y" to everything: ducky, doggy ... my favorite from this period was "cat-y", before she picked up on the more mundate "kitty". She's lately been doing silly doubles: things like (not direct quotes, but in the spirit): noodle-woodle, froggie-benoggie and so on. Recently Terrie used "speaking of which" in conversation, and now Sydney's trying that out in different contexts and ways, figuring out how it fits into the language.

They grow up so quickly

(I'm sure I'll use that title again, if I haven't already)

Part one: Sydney and I were talking about the date, and she said "okay, so Monday was the oneth, that makes today ...". I replied with the more grammatical "no, I think Tuesday was the first". She picked it up right away and replied with "no, Monday was
the first!" I'm going to miss "oneth".

Part two: Sydney has been better about this, but she used to want to keep every scrap of paper and cardboard and string that came into her world. Yesterday or today she's set aside a box for "her trash", and already filled a couple plastic bags with trash for me to take down, and talked about taking stuff out to the trash can by herself.

Part three: This has been brewing for a few days, but yesterday Sydney finally declared that she was done with the high chair, and wanted to start using a grown-up chair. Also, she's using a "real" plate in preference to her Princess plate!

We'll have to see how long these latest ideas last.