Watched the Blue Angels practicing for their big performance over Lake Washington for the big weekend. We found a good spot (Denny-Blaine Park?) with a good vantage point to watch the jets scream by in formation, then the armada of water craft making their way back to their respective docks.

We took a trip to Jetty Island this week. Despite several summer day camps there, most of them were clustered at the southern end of the jetty. We headed north and set up camp with our sun tent right next to a beach fort that had been started. The kids added to the fort. The …

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Taking a little vacation this week. The Snider parents have been visiting for the past week. Shaynee and her mom went garage saleing last weekend so they’ll have some extra things to cart back to California in their trunk, by way of a long detour through Idaho and Montana. We took the kids to Jetty …

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Time for new family photos! We opted for some professional pics. Brigette Shaffarzick (mom to Teagan in Alton’s PNPC class) runs her own photo studio, Penguin Pictures. She met us at Picnic Point Park in Lynnwood for the shoot. The weather was overcast (surprise) but still had good light. Of course, Nikola just lost a …

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It’s been a while since I’ve had to stay up late to finish a product (I suppose that’s not entirely true, since I often stay up quite late working on my lectures). Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I don’t generate much in the way of deliverables. Even when I have an abstract …

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This weekend we visited the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. The weather was very cooperative and it was sunny with a cool breeze and temps around 60F. We stopped in La Conner (along with what seemed like the rest of the denizens of King and Snohomish counties) and had lunch at the Seeds Bistro for lunch. …

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Oh, the fun you can have with $2 garage sale purchases…The kids created this HotWheels double loop of death. Alton’s newest creation that he built while Shaynee was resting. I’m beginning to wonder about that boy.

Alton really enjoys building things. LEGO is high on his list of priorities. This particular creation was built from the Radio Shack electronics kit (750 projects!) that Shaynee found at a garage sale for $2 last year. The kids wanted to play with it the other day and Nikola specifically remembered building a “flying saucer” …

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Easter morning found the kids in very excited moods. Nikola had a very hard time falling asleep last night and she even woke up for about 1.5 hours in the middle of the night because she was so excited. I don’t think that she was even this excited on Christmas Eve. Or maybe she was.The …

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This may look like just an empty planter on the lonely front deck, but if you look carefully you can see the first shoot of our many pea pods that we planted several weeks ago. It has been so long that we were beginning to suspect that they all died from the snap frost and …

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