And I got to see Thomas as well, the only sibling we were missing was Daniel.
And there was a mini reunion with most of the cousins.
And here I am with two of my little nephews, Emmett and Finn.
Meanwhile, it worked out for Grandma Colleen to come out and visit the kids and I heard glowing things about all the fun things they got to do together.
FYI this is why my children don't need any real toys. Just send us cardboard boxes and maybe some bubbles for Patrick and we're all set.
They took Grandma Colleen to the Museum at Prairie Fire (aka the dinosaur museum) and Patrick visited his favorite cockroaches and had an interesting discussion about mommies and daddies with Nathan.
And I got this great video during their pizza dinner one night. Nathan is the best to send lots of pictures and videos to a mommy who missed her sweet kids very much while I was away.
Nathan dressed the kids for church and apparently Eleanor questioned his outfit choices for the boys. Thatta girl, Eleanor. Glad somehow is helping out with fashion while I'm away.
A big win while Mommy was gone was our friend Olivia's birthday party at the gymnastics studio.
Here Bradley is seeing how many small children he can hug at once.
And Nathan got a video of the best game of duck duck goose I've ever seen.
Nathan also gets some serious credit for successfully talking Eleanor into pigtails while I was away. It's my favorite.
And then I got home and was covered in kid cuddles and things were back to the way they're supposed to be. This is why three is the perfect number for our cuddly bunch, where on earth would I put a fourth?
Apparently Grandma visits and birthday parties are very tiring.
The children weren't the only ones who missed me. Apparently someone had to throw up on my side of the bed while I was away to express her displeasure that I was gone. Our relationship is very special.
She's learning to force the children to love her. Good kitty.
We had about a week and a half between my trip out to Washington and the family trip and we filled it mostly with scooters, and public nudity on part of the two year old ...
We like to scoot through the park when the creek is overflowing. This video could have gone on forever if Nathan hadn't intervened and insisted Patrick move onward toward home.
Hitting a tree. Because you have to hit SOMETHING with a stick and Mommy said no to siblings.
And nudity. Patrick was really into taking his own diaper off by himself right before our Washington trip. It was mostly cute except for when he did it outside and the time that he did it with a poopy diaper in his bed. That was my first incident dealing with poop on carpet and I pray that it never happens again.
Video proof of Patrick's current relationship with clothes.
Finally I talked him back into a diaper at least and we went with this getup in 90 degree heat. No pants but boots, what else would you wear?
Nathan thinks Bradley is old enough to rock out in a car and I gotta say, kid looks good doing it.
We tried to tell a story together but got interrupted by Eleanor (who it turned out wasn't hurt). Bradley will literally sit and play with a toy and tell himself stories for up to an hour at a time. No exaggeration. Especially if he's sitting on the toilet. I really need to start trying to record some of these stories. I catch bits and pieces and they all sound amazing. No shortage of dinosaurs and dragons and adventure!
Kid umbrellas out on the way into the gym. Of course it had stopped raining by this point but if you have a cool umbrella you must seek out opportunities to use it!
And Patrick practicing singing his ABC's. ABCDEFG ... H I know my ABC's!
Cute napping buddies. Side note - this is our favorite blanket to nap with. It is very comfy. But sometimes the fact that it has our faces on it is a little eerie ...
Patrick is such a big help with his big brother and sister and honestly sometimes there is no saying no to his help, like when he helps with Eleanor's evening eye compress and counts for her.
He also went through a phase where he really like to read It Looked Like Spilt Milk to me. I apologize for my short shorts in this video, they usually aren't quite that short ... but cute Patrick and sweet older children more than make up for it!
And this little girl - I could just eat her up sometimes. We did a shopping trip to Target together to get some much needed clothes for the family pictures that were coming up in Washington and she pretended she was on a roller coaster for most of the car ride.
And this is her favorite new pose now, kind of a cross legged curtsy. No idea where she picked it up but I love it. And check out the dress my mom made for her! We got stopped at least four times while we were in the store for compliments on how cute it was.
There was a shoe sale and Eleanor almost talked me into these heels and I deserve some sort of parenting prize for being able to talk her into new tennis shoes instead.
And soon enough, we were off for the trip! We had to get up at about 4am but the kids were so excited to be leaving that there were big smiles all around.
Patrick trying to copy everything the big kids do is so precious.
Pre flight group hug!
Fun note - a woman coming up the escalator asked my parents if they were "the grandparents." She told them we were very excited to see them. We had not discussed our travel plans with anyone on the flight, but we talked about them with the children and none of us are quiet. The kids flew like champs and were very good (thank you tablets!!) but anything we discussed the whole surrounding area got to know about.
We settled in very quickly at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Bradley loved his new dinosaur game Grandma picked out for him!
There was a lot of reading on this trip.
Sometimes it was difficult to concentrate on just one book with so many readers around.
We loved our time playing at the beach!
Lucky Grandpa, getting to play calm games by the water with Bradley.
And Patrick found a dog who would fetch a stick in the water and he couldn't even handle how amazing it all was.
Uncle Thomas at the beach!
And not drowning or drifting out to sea in the $20 raft that Nathan and I decided was fit for Puget Sound with small children.
The wooded lot by my parent's house also was a big hit of the trip. My amazing dad cut trails throughout the whole thing and the kids went nuts getting to run around. Or get carried around, you know, whatever worked best for the child in question.
Patrick fought a lot of monsters in those woods.
And can you see a Bradley in the picture below? No? That's right, that's some good hiding. Bradley liked to try to go off path and hide.
Hiding got a little trickier when his little brother got involved, because if a grownup yells "where are you?" the little one always cheerfully answers "right heah!"
That is not Patrick's hand covering his mouth in the picture below. It is poor Bradley trying to keep the two year old from giving away their hiding spot.
Between getting up at 2am Seattle time and having a rather short nap on the way home from the airport, Patrick got a bit manic on our first day. And it helps that Grandma knows the best way to get a good belly laugh.
Bedtime stories were amazing for kids with extra grownups to read to them and a huge supply of my childhood books.
We had some very tired kids on this trip. But good news, they never fully adapted to the time change so it wasn't difficult to get them back on Kansas time when we got home. Patrick woke up around 5am for much of our time in Washington, naps for both kids and parents were an important part of our time there.
Also surviving what appeared to be the apocalypse when we got to watch the bright red sun set into the smoke each evening because of wildfires in Canada. Our air quality was worse than Beijing while we were there. Thanks, Canada. (This is not just an excuse to post a cutesie smoochie picture. You can see the apocalypse sun setting in the background. But hey, what better way to show the sun than with a smoochie picture!).
Uncle Thomas was at my parents' house while we were visiting and was a favorite with all of the kids, but none more than Patrick.
It's not too tough to see why he was so popular.
Great Grandma is a very good sport about some of the shenanigans that went on while she was around.
It was pretty great to have time with Great Grandma.
And this is the only way to knock over block towers.
But Eleanor knows how to get her cuddles no matter what.
Patrick found some tennis balls and rackets in Thomas' room early in the trip and had a LOT of questions for him and this resulted in some pretty excellent tennis lessons for our two year old who so desperately wants to play all the sports.
Patrick liked every sport with Uncle Thomas though, it took a fair bit of work by the end of the trip to keep him from grabbing a football at around 6am and running down to go visit his wonderful Uncle Thomas. All day long could be Uncle Thomas time as far as Patrick is concerned.
We got to take a day trip out to Lopez Island to visit my mom's cousins, the Crinklaws. We like ferry rides it turns out.
We especially like dogs that people bring on ferry rides. We made a lot of friends going both to and from Lopez.
Arriving at Lopez Island!
Lopez was amazing. My cousin Patty and her husband Wayne have a house within walking distance of the ferry dock and they're right on the beach, which was tons of fun for the kids.
Eleanor saw a camera and knew it was time to pose.
Cuddle time with cousin Patty!
Grandpa in particular really enjoyed helping his grandchildren walk around on jagged and uneven terrain and wished he could have supervised more children while we were at the beach.
Eleanor's manic cackles at playing this hilarious game with Grandpa were fairly amazing.
Patrick is in a bit of a mommy phase right now. I think I'm okay with it.
More doggy friends.
Some of us prefer to spend our time in serious discussions with grownups.
However, so much fun can be rather tiring.
Tiring for all involved. Poor sweet kiddos. They were champs for the whole trip.
We got back and decided the best thing to do after a very full day going to Lopez Island was to take the kids to the Stanwood/Camano Fair the very next day. Patrick begged hard for a pony ride and what the two year old begs for in front of grandparents the two year old gets.
And the other excited children get it too.
Patrick did NOT want to get off the pony at the end of the ride.
Good thing we found new, cheaper ponies to ride on after this.
And cotton candy!
I love this pic. Patrick was rather unsure of the whole cotton candy thing and kept trying to test it out on nearby adults. He's lucky his daddy is such a good sport.
Fair rides were pretty amazing.
And we even met up with a friend of mine from college and her kids. The girls in particular bonded quickly.
But the best part of the fair may have been after the rides ...
When we discovered the giant bubble guy!
It was as fun as this picture makes it look. The kids played hard with their new friends for at least thirty minutes. Bubbles!
Group shot with my friend Yoon-mi and her family. Seven children between the two of us!
It's too bad we don't live closer!
After all the serious activities we tried to take it a bit easier on the crew so we got to dress up fancy and pose fancy for church the next day.
And spent lots of time cuddling after Grandma did a fancy french braid for Eleanor's hair.
Some of Grandma's cuddle pictures with grandchildren were a little more active in nature. You gotta work for the Patrick snuggles.
But once you get them it's fairly precious.
Patrick would like for you to know that picking blueberries is fun. But just eating them straight off the bush is funner.
And I like to think that I love my children a lot and would do almost anything for them, but only a grandparent would cut a grilled cheese sandwich into the shape of a t-rex for his 5 year old grandson. Who then refused to eat it because it was too beautiful.
We read Bradley's new dinosaur books, which Patrick tolerated for a short while while trying to steal Uncle Thomas away to play football.
Bradley got a fair bit of reading in on this trip. This was the stack of books he brought over to Grandpa to read one afternoon. They made it through two before they needed to move on to new adventures.
We love the great playground they have on Camano Island now! It was a hit last year as well.
Cuddle breaks are important even when you're playing hard.
And Grandma and Eleanor baked some pies together which was of great excitement and I've been told by small children that I need to step up my baking game here at home.
We did all sit and watch at least a few shows while we were there. We discovered a spooky stories show for kids on Netflix and Patrick is rather obsessed.
He also discovered a bouncy ball dispenser at the grocery store when he and I were there on a shopping trip and I told him that I was not supposed to get things like that for him, he needed a grandparent for that. So for the rest of our shopping trip he proceeded to ask if every person he saw with a gray hair was a grandparent in the hopes that they would be and he could get them to get him the ball he so desperately wanted. It seems I should have been more specific about it being his very own grandparent. Luckily for him, I told my parents this story when we got home and the next time we went to the store he had Grandma along with him and she made sure to get him the object of his heart's desire. Which he slept with and carried around with him everywhere for the rest of the trip.
Nathan spent a fair time cuddled up by this guy on the floor for the trip - what a wonderful daddy!
We had a few other exciting mini adventures, we got to see an amazing train room in the basement of one of my parents' friend's houses.
There was a nice forest out back too and none of my children fell in the stinging nettles that were everywhere so miracles really do occur.
And we got to see another family friend's miniature pony!
The kids were mostly interested in feeding it flowers and the peaches that it wasn't supposed to eat that were scattered all over the ground.
But one of the biggest highlights of the trip was getting a four generation photo of mothers and daughters together!
We also had a fancy tea party to celebrate girl time which was greatly improved when Bradley invited himself in on the action and raided my parents' utensil drawer to find every interesting looking spoon or knife and drank a fair amount of hot cocoa and was a great help in eating the fancy pie that my mom had made for the event.
Then we kicked the boys out of the house and because I know Great Grandma loves puzzles, I made her do a complicated 3D puzzle dollhouse with us! Her expression in this photo fully captures her level of excitement over the rather detailed instruction manual with tons of tiny numbers all over it.
We ended up more or less ditching the instruction manual and figured out the very cute puzzle. It was a lot of fun!
And my parents got a 3D puzzle for Bradley too, which he assembled with Uncle Thomas. They used their instruction manual. So silly of them.
We were very cozy with Great Grandma for the couple of times we saw her after our exciting tea party day.
Nathan's Aunt Tina came up to visit for the day which was a blast since it had been a couple years since we had last seen her.
And we actually got in a couple trips to actual tennis courts with Bradley and Patrick.
Do you know that the correct thing to say while swinging a tennis racket is "hiyaaaah!"? Well you do now!
Patrick really got pretty decent at hitting the ball back, we're definitely going to find some courts here and play on the weekends.
Nathan and I spent one day down in Seattle. He had to work. I got great time in with my friend Serena eating lunch and going out for donuts!
But he got friend time in too. We have some pretty great people that we miss quite a bit back there!
We came home to this. After I showed this picture to my parents they said that Bradley had been saying something about not wanting the bandaids on his knees to touch the covers.
I know this was a good trip because my kids were exhausted and kept falling asleep on me towards the end of the trip.
The best was when we went to take them swimming one last time at the pretty excellent pool at the YMCA in Stanwood and both boys were asleep when we got there and stayed asleep for the entire walk in from the cars to checking in at the front desk and sitting on chairs in the lobby for a little bit. Wake up, tired children! Let's go swimming!
Singing rockabye baby with Grandpa. When the cradle falls you get dunked.
Shooting hoops! Eleanor is lucky her daddy is so strong!
And snuggles with my little buddy. I'm kind of smitten with this little guy.
And no big deal, the first time we went swimming they were handing out ice cream cones as we left. The kids all highly approved the whole swimming adventure, from beginning to end.
I made sure we got some pics with the beautiful view on my parents' deck. Nothing like waiting until five minutes before we leave for the group picture!
This was also around the time when Bradley was trying to talk Grandma into letting him take home my sister Laura's favorite dragon stuffed toy from her childhood and when Grandma said she would make him a new one he tried to negotiate for a chimera (goat, lion, and dragon heads with a snake tail). We looked on Amazon to see if she could just buy him this very complex stuffed toy and it seems that the mythology themed stuffed toy market is just not what it should be.
And I guess I should have noticed how tightly Eleanor was clinging to Grandpa in the airport ...
Because goodbye was tough. Good thing she only sobbed hysterically for about 20 minutes as we went through security all while saying "Grammy! Gampa!" on repeat. She felt better as soon as I got her a chocolate muffin at a coffee shop by our terminal, but things were rather touch and go there for a while.
And to really just welcome us home, we went to our neighborhood block party after we arrived back in Kansas and Eleanor managed to trip while running and get her face pretty good on some gravel on the road. We went to urgent care right away to sort her out and she was a champ despite having to get a saline spray in the rather difficult area between her nose and mouth and getting a tetanus shot while we were there for good measure.
This is what she looked like once we bandaged her up. All of the bandaids are gone now except for what we refer to as the mustache bandaid. That's healing but in a rather lumpy fashion (it was the deepest gash from the rough road) so we're getting to talk to some dermatologists and plastic surgeons about how to best help her heal without scarring. But she's healthy and nothing is broken so we're looking on the bright side while we get her sorted out!
This was the day she also was told to say something nice about the dinner I made and when asked what her favorite part was said "I like this apple you made for me." I make really good apples.
And Bradley started kindergarten this past week!
We ended up going ahead and enrolling him in full day. I agonized about this decision quite a bit but had to come to terms with it when I got a copy of what the full day schedule would look like and saw that he would miss little things like math and science if I took him home at lunchtime.
He has done really well so far and doesn't seem too exhausted in the evenings, although he did complain today about feeling really tired while at school and when I urgently asked him why and was it after lunch he said "well they kept telling us to run while in PE and I kept on running as hard as I could and then I was really tired." Oh. Well that sounds pretty reasonable then.
His very smart teacher (Mrs. Clayton) keeps sending him home with prizes too, so the little guy is doing okay with this new full day school and every day deal. And he'll sing little songs that he learned and start chanting rhyming words at dinner, it's very cute.
Patrick missed his best bud Mabel while we were gone but they were joyfully reunited upon our return.
We went to the Museum at Prairie Fire to see the near complete solar eclipse and had the children demonstrate the science what was happening.
And my friend Julie and I looking cool in our solar eclipse glasses! Too bad my two year old refused to wear his and wanted nothing to do with anything until official near total eclipse moment and then he tried to stare directly at the sun. So Patrick, when you are not blind when you are 30, just know that it is because your caring mother drug you inside the building during the prime time of a once in a lifetime event in order to save you from yourself.
But really, there is no saving these children from themselves. This is the new trick Patrick has taught the big kids to do on our tricycle. It's all the rage in the Scott house these days!
And this is obviously pre Eleanor face injury but I just love how she and Patrick play these days.
It's too bad she didn't get to tell Patrick a full story. I don't read him books before his nap anymore, he only wants original stories. "One princess, two monsters, and two bad guys" he'll whisper at me. And then I'll tell him two stories (always about princesses, monsters, and bad guys) and if I tell him we're all done and he wants more the little imp will grab my nose and whisper "more stories" while cackling to himself. Because he does it in a cute manner it has worked once or twice but now I have to put my foot down because the nose pinching was getting a bit aggressive. He also smooches me for stories. This kid knows how to work his mommy, I'll do most things when kids are being cute and smooching me a bit!
