Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Here are the picture highlights from our trip.

The title was just too perfect, since we utilized all three modes of transport in our most recent trip! It was a great time for a visit for many reasons: besides the fact that it's summer vacation, so both grandmothers are free from schoolteachin' right now, we had other special occasions to celebrate, like Christa's bridal shower, birthdays for Grandpa Charlie and Aunt Cari (who swanned off to Hawaii to celebrate her graduation from her Master's Degree Program!), and Cousin *P's big FIRST birthday party. Quite a lot to do!

Alton and I flew down to Sacramento and picked up a sidekick, my good friend Julie, who was on the West Coast from her home in Maryland to attend the bridal shower. Andy had stayed behind in Oregon to work another day, then hopped into the car with his trusty companion (Minerva, of course) and bombed down the highway in record time to join us at his parents' house. Andy, Alton and the 'Nerve got comfortable with Grammy and Grandpa while Julie and I were "all aboard" good 'ol Amtrak to chug our way down to San Jose and begin our flurry of bridesmaid preparations. This was the first time that I had ever left Alton overnight, and I admit that there were some tears (on my end, naturally) before our train departed and I was separated from my baby for nearly two whole days! I was very grateful to have Julie with me to distract me from my nervousness, but felt obligated to warn her ahead of time that the train journey would be dull and unromantic. I had had necessity to ride the train in the past a few times from the Bay Area down to Santa Maria, and each time would groan with remembrance at the way the train doubled the amount of time it took to travel the same mileage by car, never ran on time, and glazed your eyes over with views of brown fields as you shrank away from your fellow (unwashed) passengers. You are all ready for the train to be this romantic 1950s movie set with uniformed porters and champagne and women with pearl-buttoned gloves carrying those little hard-sided round cases (Why do we have this image of train travel? Is it because that period of time was the last point in history when trips by train outnumbered those by air? I am completely just talking stream-of-consciousness--I have no actual research to back up these speculations.), but in reality, the staff are surly, the dining car has extremely limited hours of business that allow you to purchase gross microwaved hamburgers, and the little hard-sided round cases have been replaced with duffel bags emblazoned with promotional messaging.
However, Julie and I found ourselved pleasantly surprised, for the most part. The views were lovely, the train ran to schedule, we had our entire car to ourselves for pretty much all of the trip, and the only weird interaction with the staff came when the conductor announced several times over the loudspeaker that if THE PERSON who was smoking didn't STOP SMOKING, she would stop the train and HAVE THIS PERSON ARRESTED. I think I am going to post her on passiveaggressivenotes.com.
Once down in San Jose, Julie and I threw ourselves, along with five other bridesmaids, into a maelstrom of cooking, baking, slicing, dicing, scrapbooking and beautifying for bridal festivities. We had a really lovely time, we were so busy that I didn't even have time to think (too much) about missing Alton and Andy, and we got a chance to let our hair down and have fun.

Alton and Andy, meanwhile, took a tour of some tractor/crop sprayer projects at UC Davis with Andy's friend Ryan, played in the water, went to the park, made friends with the cats, took pictures with Grammy and Grandpa, and had a blast until it was time to drive into San Francisco and pick up Mommy for the drive down to Santa Maria. We spent four days down in my Central Coast hometown with Nonna and Papa Carnine and Uncle K.C., and had a great time hanging out, showing off all of Alton's latest words and accomplishments, and taking Alton to the BEACH for the first time.

Then we Oregon Rhynes piled back into the car and returned to Woodland with Grammy and Grandpa for a momentous event--Cousin *P's first birthday party! She and Alton are now both the big 0-1. We had a far too short visit with Zach, Karen and the birthday girl, and after some more downtime with the Rhyne grandparents we loaded the car up and drove home to Oregon.

After so much driving already, we decided that the best baby road trip tactic would be to leave Woodland/Sacramento area when it was time for Alton to go to bed, and that way he would conk out with tiredness a few minutes into the drive and we could blast to our destination without having to stop every hour or so, for an hour, to give Alton exercise and entertainment. We had utilized this approach successfully when we left Santa Maria, and Alton fell asleep within 15 minutes of our departure and we tore up the highway straight from SM to Woodland in 5 hours flat with no stops (yes, Claire, I know that's bad for my circulation).
Alton foiled us a bit by staying awake for more than two hours, requesting books and snacks and finally necessitating a pit stop to do a diaper change, but we rallied and pressed on and eventually he drifted off in the dark backseat. So our plan was to drive about 4.5 hours, get up 'n over the Siskiyou Pass and stay the night in Ashland, Oregon, and then get up in the morning and drive another 4-plus hours home. We had snacks and sodas and it was nearing 11pm as we started up the grade to the Siskiyou Pass. The last time we'd made this trek had been during our Christmas drive (see here), and it had been daylight and snowy, so things looked pretty different in the dark, black stillness. Andy was driving and I was tensely looking out of every window at once, making sure I could see every upcoming curve in the road and verifying that none of the other drivers got too close to us (bloody weirdos). As we crossed the apex of the Pass and began our descent down the other side, I noticed that there was an exit-type lane off to my right, with a prominently-placed sign indicating that this was the "Runaway Truck Ramp," for big rigs that experience brake failure as they drive down the grade. This lane continued for a couple hundred feet, appearing to end in a few Mini Convertible-sized heaps of gravel rock that must have been helpfully appropriated there by ODOT. Um...what? I must have missed this during our Christmas drive. Where's the "I Just Sh*t My Pants" Ramp? Because that is EXACTLY what I would do if I was driving down the grade of the Siskiyou Pass at 10:30 at night and saw a semi truck 15 feet away from me screeching down the Runaway Truck ramp on failed brakes with no hope of stopping save a few bags of road base. Time to build my family a cabin in the woods on the mountain, because ain't no WAY I'm getting inside a car ever again.
Thankfully, our late-night drive passed without incident, we made it to Ashland for a good night's rest, and Andy and Alton took a nice long nap together in the backseat of the car during the drive home the next day. Our biggest bummer was having to schlep our picnic lunch to a shady spot in a park in Salem through 95-degree heat, because with Minerva in tow we couldn't abscond to a nice air-conditioned restaurant. But since we were only about 45 miles from home, we didn't care. We booked it as best we could for that last leg of the journey, got home and you know the rest: heat wave, busted A/C, R-rated movies, rugby players, miracle in the Andes, repairman, mercifully cool air, the end. Oh, and I got glasses.

Update!

It's still hot. No change there. But the A/C is fixed and pumping away. Apparently it was a very common failure of an electrical part. Whatever. Fixed is fixed! Now the Popsicles will be purely recreational rather than life-saving.

And because it's the blog, here's an obligatory cute picture of AJ (with Grandpa).

It's, um, hot.

When we returned from our CA vacation, the house was about 85 degrees. Holy moly! And it only got hotter here in Hillsboro, so the little AC unit that could has been running nonstop...and broke down yesterday. It's, um, kinda hard to cool down a two-story house with no air conditioning when it's 110 degrees outside, as it was yesterday. We're roasting! Luckily we have some fans, which ran all night in the bedrooms to make it bearable for us to sleep. Alton took a cool bath and had the biggest standing fan of all in his bedroom, which seemed to arrive at a livable, albeit warm, temperature for him. We had the ceiling fan and a smaller tabletop fan in our room and were roasting. A cold shower seemed to do the trick for a little while, but didn't cool things down quickly enough. I checked a thermometer, which said it was 91 degrees in the room. Holy smokes! I know people who would like their steaks cooked at that temp. Andy was passed out, of course, since he could sleep standing up (and has), while talking, or knee-deep in snow. And probably all three at once. But Minerva and I were tossing and turning. The poor pup just wandered around, trying to find the coolest spot on the floor, and has continued to lie very still on the ground all day today, vacillating on whether she thinks it's cooler to lie on the carpet with the fan, or on the linoleum of the kitchen/bathroom. We three are waiting here for the A/C repairman who is supposed to come sometime today to check out the unit, but I'm not hopeful. It's only in the movies that people get a repairman to tell them that the only reason they don't have A/C is because a bug died in the unit and had to be removed. We are probably going to be told that the tiny unit in our backyard must have been intended for some other Pacific Northwest city where it's not supposed to get this hot during the summer, and should only be running for the occasional chilly spurt, not all day and night for three days straight. Baaaaah.
Alton is down to just a thin little pair of cotton madras shorts and a diaper (it would be diaper-only, but he will take it off if shorts are not on top) and I'm wearing my pajama boxers because "real" shorts seem like too heavy of fabric. I think our post-lunch snack is going to be frozen fruit bars in the kitchen, which Daddy so helpfully purchased last night. Meanwhile, I have a poll for you all to take! A few weeks ago, I put the movie Alive on our Netflix queue on a whim, because I hadn't seen it in a long time. Now, forgetting for a moment that it's rated R, full of swear words, and we don't normally let Alton watch TV, do you think that I should turn it on? Because really, if a movie about a stranded group of Argentinian rugby players freezing to death in the icy, snowy Andes and eating their friends' corpses to stay alive doesn't cool you down, what will?
Here's a computer camera shot of our living room right now, excuse the graininess. We brought a bunch of Alton's toys downstairs to play since it's marginally cooler down here. The sad black blob on the left is Minerva.

Christmas in July

(While I am preparing the post about our most recent July trip to California, I thought I would whet your appetites with the story of our Christmas journey, a mammoth post that I have been adding to a little bit at a time as I think about it. It's nice to look at snow pictures when it's 105 degrees outside.)
Prologue
Travel to the past back to our Christmas journey. So the trip, in our minds at least, started much earlier than Christmas as we prepared for the drive. We decided to drive because with our respective families living about 5 hours apart, there is no way that is cheaper and quicker and less painless to get between their homes than to drive ourselves. Flying and then renting a car would be a lot of money, compounded by the big cha-ching of putting Minerva in a kennel for almost two weeks while we were gone and there'd be nothing leftover to buy Christmas presents. Then with the huge amount of snow we got right before Christmas (biggest snow in 40-odd years or so) flights were getting canceled left, right, and center, so we were glad we hadn't planned on flying out of Portland. But driving down meant a lot of things: 15 hours in the car with a baby, trying to cram three people and a dog into my little compact car, and oh, yeah, the weather around this time of year. Many people know that a Bay Area family driving home from Oregon actually got trapped in the snow a few years ago, so with the spectre of their disastrous trip hanging over my head, I wanted to make sure we overplanned for our own holiday journey. We bought a cargo box for my roof rack and a GPS navigator. We packed a small shovel, ice scraper and snow chains, plus extra hats, coats and gloves. I packed a giant road trip snacks bag with nonperishables and a cooler for drinks (plenty of snow to keep those cold). We had blankets, flashlights, mirrors, breast pump...we practically took the space heater and a generator to make sure there would be no dramatic Lifetime movie in our future called "There's No Place Like Snow for the Holidays."
We started a list of things to remember to bring about two months ahead of time, and every time we remembered something to bring (camera batteries, bath chair for baby, Minerva's dog dishes) we would add to the list. We had our "to-dos" for the week ahead of time and got everything done, including Andy changing the oil for the car at about 7:30 at night, in the dark, on the driveway covered in at least eight inches of ice and snow. After getting everything loaded, Andy and I looked around the car stuffed to the gills and pondered what the heck we were thinking ever even debating about buying the rooftop cargo box...there's no way we would have been able to do the trip without it. I don't think that Mazda intended the compact Protegé hatchback to be used as an RV-slash-moving van. It's a hatchback, not a full-size wagon, so Minerva is luckily petite enough to just barely fit comfortably into the wayback of the car, and we put her fluffy bed and bag of food back there. Then we realized that our overnight duffel needed to go back there, so we squeezed it in as her pillow. We continued to gradually encroach upon her space until, on the drive home, she was squashed back there with two bags, pillow, The Club, two dremels, the snow chains and a box full of picture frames. Don't worry, she could still get up and turn around.
Day 1
Okay, so the plan. The plan was to drive in the afternoon/evening on the first day, Dec 23, after Andy left work early and get down to Medford (Southern Oregon close to the CA border, but before you get to the Siskiyou Pass) and spend the night there in a hotel--5-ish hours of driving. Then we get up on Christmas Eve, get across the Siskiyou Pass, and cruise down to Andy's parents (Grammy and Grandpa Rhyne) in Sacramento to stay the night there--5-ish hours of driving. Then we get up early Christmas morning, book it down to my parents & sibs in Santa Maria, and we're opening presents before it gets too late--and you guessed it: 5-ish hours of driving. So three days, five hours of driving each day, plenty of time to stop for the baby's comfort, feeding, diaper changes, etc. We arranged the gear in the car so that one person could always be riding in the back with Alton to keep him entertained, with the intention that this would mainly be Andy since I get carsick when I'm not riding up front.

The best laid plans...turn into treacherous ice ruts that make the state department of transportation close the highway during rush hour. They say that ODOT's tough decision to close southbound I-5 in the smack middle of rush hour made national news as a "What the #%^*, guys?", but our beef with this move was not that the highway was closed, but that it was simply shut down, with no detours, no explanations, no cops or state troopers out guiding traffic.

We had left our house with chains on the car, the foot of snow and ice from the weekend making slow going on the slick, slippery roads. It took us more than an hour to go the 10 or so miles to I-5, so we'd barely made it out of the neighboring town when Alton was squawking his need for a break. We stopped off in a parking lot, elected to remove the chains and gave baby and dog their piddle breaks. Back on the highway at a whopping 5MPH for another 45 minutes when Alton had once again had enough. As we exited the highway, we noticed that the onramp to I-5S (the freeway we'd just left) was blocked by a state trooper's vehicle and a line of cars waited to get on. Assuming there must be an accident, we headed off to a McDonald's for another round of diaper changes and feeding before attempting to get back on the highway. We assumed that if an accident blocked the Southbound onramp, we'd just head Northbound and double back, right?
We turned onto the major cross street that would take us to the freeway onramp and just stopped cold (no pun intended). We were on the inside lane of a two-lane road, just sitting still while we watched the traffic light up ahead change from green, to yellow, to red without any cars moving at all. The cars ahead of us started to move--yay!--until we realized that this was because someone in a Bronco had four-wheeled it over the center divide and was now heading in the opposite direction back into town. A quick glance at our GPS told us that directly to the south of us the Willamette River crossed perpendicular to the highway, so even if we had been able to find our way around town there would be no telling how far east or west we would have to go to find a road that crossed over the river and would lead us back to I-5. So...we were stuck.
Down in Santa Maria, the Carnine fam had been keeping vigil with rosaries (in Pam's case) and Internet traffic alerts (in Steve's case). In the car we had Andy's iPhone to check the traffic site, but it had no new information (apparently their 'Net guy only works Tuesdays and Thursdays or something) and so it was time to call in the broadband support. We called the Carnine Casa and my Mom answered the phone.
Me: "Is Dad there?"
Mom: "No, not right now."
Me: "Okay, we need you to look up online to see if there's any additional traffic information about this area--Wilsonville Road in Wilsonville--because we're looking it up on the iPhone and we aren't seeing anything new and we don't know what's going on and we're just stuck here on the road. We're thinking that maybe if ODOT hasn't posted anything new, a local news station might be covering an accident or something, so maybe they would have something up on their site."
Mom: "Hmm. I think...your Dad left the traffic website up...on the computer...and I can go look at it...."
Me: "Um, Mom? Is there, um, anyone else there right now? Like Cari? Because this is kind of Defcon 5 here--we don't know what sites to look at and we need someone to do some quick researching around."
Mom: "Okay. Yeah, KC is here."
A quick conversation with KC and we were hunched over the phone while he clicked away on his laptop hundreds of miles away, with the sky around us rapidly approaching complete darkness and our Odometer rapidly approaching a big fat .001 miles traveled in the last 30 minutes. Finally KC spoke.
KC: "Try 1640 AM."
Me: "Oh, a radio station? I didn't think of that. (Andy tuning dial to 1640AM.) Can you also check on a local television news station? We were just thinking that they might have someone out at the scene of the accident covering it to tell us what's going on and when they might be able to open the onramp again."
Radio: "...static...You're listening!...static...to RADIO DISNEY!!!!"
Hmm, maybe not. KC went back to the virtual drawing board and found some tiny mention on a blogger's site about the current traffic predicament: Due to unsafe road conditions, the southbound highway was closed, as were the onramps. ODOT would reopen the onramps on a rolling basis "as conditions improve." Dad also made it home at this point and found the same dismal news every place he checked. So our options at this point were to a) sit in the traffic, not moving, for goodness' knows how long and hope that the highway would reopen in a reasonable amount of time, or b) head for home, which would take a couple of hours and would leave our "miles traveled" marker for the day at a big fat ZERO. We opted for Option A and it was terrible. We moved about one city block in almost three hours.
At one point Alton had really had enough and I had to quell my overcautiousness and remove him from the car seat, but of course in doing this caught a whiff of poo. And how exactly do you change a poopy diaper in the dark and freezing cold in a car "parked" in dead-stopped traffic on an icy road? I elected to grab the baby and diaper bag and cross the street to a nearby Wendy's to use their bathroom. I had the cellphone handy in case traffic miraculously began to move and Andy had to brush the cobwebs off the gas pedal to inch the car forward. It was the fastest diaper change ever and I trudged back through the 10-inch snow drifts to the car, which had moved exactly 0mm since I had left it. We ate some road trip snack food (man, if we had known what was in store for us we would have stocked up on Big Macs at the Mickey D's when first we stopped) and waited, hoping that we would get on the highway with at least enough time to drive down to Eugene (we had long ago realized we'd have to forfeit our hotel reservation in Medford), a sorta halfway point of Oregon.
They finally let us back on the highway around 9pm (remember we left our house at 1:30pm), but although the roads had been plowed they were still not safe to drive on at more than 20-25 MPH, so we rolled onward slowly. We passed by the Woodburn outlets and I recalled how, when I went shopping there with Mom and Cari, they were less than an hour from our house in Hillsboro. Gulp.
We hit Salem around 11pm and decided to call it a night. Salem is about 60 miles from our house, and it took us about 10 hours to get there. We played a little Mary and Joseph skit, no-room-at-the-inn style, when it took three tries for us to find a hotel that accepted dogs and didn't charge you $100 to do it. We fell exhausted into our king bed and got up at 7am to do it all again.

Day 2
Day Two was actually not so bad, except for the fact that we had to do two days' worth of driving (minus the incredible 60 miles we'd traveled the day before) in one day. We got our early start and once we were out of Salem the snow was pretty much gone and the roads were clear. I took my turn at the wheel just north of Eugene and was able to marvel at how beautiful Oregon is. Everything is very green, and the grey day cast the scenery into perfect, clear focus, the better to see miles of mountains, farmland and trees, trees, trees. We traveled for awhile in an uneventful drizzle that appeared to be manipulated by computer-generated special effects as I watched the flying drops slowly turn to solid snowflakes. Alton slept peacefully as Andy and I monitored how the snow piles on the side of the road seemed to increase in size the farther south we drove. We exchanged nervous glances in the rearview mirror as I tightly gripped the wheel and we neared the (dun, dun, DUN) Siskiyou Pass. Much of our progress for the rest of the day would hinge on the Pass being open, because if it was closed then our southbound traffic would get diverted to the coast via windy mountain roads that gave my mom grey hairs just to think of them. As it turned out, we needn't have worried. The valley just north of the Pass was not very snowy and barely even cold, and the pass itself was much shorter than we thought it would be. We drove with our noses figuratively pressed to the windows, peering into the white gloom for our first glimpse of sunny California, where it's shorts and flip flops all year round. We exclaimed when we saw the "Entering California" road sign, and amazingly as soon as we got down to the valley in Yreka the snow was gone, the sun was out, and we rummaged through our car for sunglasses and happily munched on snacks while we gloated about what a breeze the rest of our trip would be. A gas stop in Weed (famous for this road sign) had us backpedaling as hail and icy wind whipped through our sweatshirts and then turned to sleety rain on our way down to Redding. It continued to bucket all the way to Sacramento, where Grammy and Grandpa Rhyne reside, but we pushed onward at all costs. Many of you know of our adamant house rule that Alton does not watch any TV at all, but even this ironclad law was broken as we neared our destination. On the pitch-black highway with deafening rain pelting the car, Alton had run out of patience for the carseat and, taking my turn as the in-flight entertainment, I had no light with which to amuse him. So I caved, pulled out Andy's laptop, and switched on Finding Nemo for an agog Alton, who spent a happy 15 minutes watching fishies swim back and forth (sound was useless on the laptop's crappy speakers) before getting to Chez Rhyne, where we made sure to feed him lots of fish oil capsules and read aloud from the encyclopedia to counterbalance the dulling effect of television on his brain. Okay, maybe I'm kidding. But we were welcomed by Grammy and Grandpa with open arms to wind down before bed. What a Christmas Eve that was!

Day 3
Ah, Christmas morning, and by far our easiest day of travel so far! The morning was a little overcast and rainy, but we got all packed up, led a weary Minerva to the car and coaxed Alton into his car seat again (although he got his revenge: a gigantic doo doo just after we had stopped for gas a couple exits down the highway, so we had to change his grand stinkiness on the backseat in the empty parking lot of a Petco since nothing was open) and hit the road. Alton had his Christmas bib on from Nonna and Papa Carnine (it was hard to find a Baby's 1st Christmas shirt for a 12 month old! I guess they figure if you are almost 1 year old, you have already had your first Christmas?) and conked out only about 30 minutes into our drive. I persuaded Andy to go to sleep as well, since being a passenger in a car is to him like the rest of us dining on turkey and Tylenol PM with a warm milk chaser. The day before while trying to soothe Alton to sleep, Andy was starting to doze off in between verses of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star": "How I wonder...mmm...what...you aaahhhZZZZZZZZZZ." So while I am driving we employ the rule that Andy sleeps when the baby sleeps so that he isn't falling down on the job of in-flight entertainment. The bright spot in our long drive from Sacramento to Santa Maria (other than arriving in the loving arms of our family at the end of our journey, of course!) was meeting Paul and Christa at the Gonzalez McDonald's at midday! The Dynamic Duo had exactly the opposite Christmas Day plans from us, and were driving from Santa Maria northward to Sac to spend time with Paul's family that day. We had half-jokingly tossed out the idea of meeting somewhere on the highway as we passed like ships in the night, but little did we know that we would be able to rendezvous in Gonzalez, favorite small town rest stop of all Bay Area-bound Santa Marians! (First choice: Dairy Queen, always, but they were closed on Christmas Day.) P and C pulled into the parking lot within 60 seconds of us and our brief reunion commenced! Minerva was far too busy sniffing every blade of grass on the median, so all the attention was focused on Alton, who posed affably for pictures and allowed himself to be passed from person to person as well. I'm certain I saw Christa taking deep whiffs of Alton's sweet, clean baby scent, and Paul seemed to relish the opportunity to chat with Altie man to man, since the youngest generation in his family is all girls. But the clock was ticking away, so too soon we had to load up our tired selves in the respective cars and head off to points North and South. The rest of our drive was happily uneventful. We had loaded up the iPod with library CDs of favorite kid songs (radio? who needs a radio?), so we blasted the tunes and kept Alton interested in such oldie-but-goodies as "On Top Of Spaghetti," "I Told the Witch Doctor I Was In Love With You," and Elmo singing "Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay." Listen if you dare. We got to Santa Maria and the family waited, oh, tens of minutes before the great present unwrapping commenced, and Alton found himself embroiled in a sea of duplos, puzzle pieces, and cute clothes.
Epilogue
After many days of fun with family, we drove our tired selves to Oregon. The snow was almost completely gone for most of the drive, so we basked in sparkling, tree-filled country as we wended our way up I-5. We drove past scenic rivers and gorgeous mountains and I reflected about the road to our new home. Despite the fact that we were traveling on a major West Coast thoroughfare, people are surprisingly considerate and deferential to other drivers. It's something that you notice right away driving in Oregon as opposed to California, a state that I love for many things, though none of those are related to driving etiquette. It was obvious that the closer we got to the Bay Area, the more other drivers were exasperatedly passing us no matter what speed we were going, and I guessed that the reason was the out of state license plate; it was just assumed that we would be slower. And I suppose that's fair, since most of Oregon doesn't have speed limits higher than 65 mph, and in most major cities it's still only 50. There are some more sparsely-populated stretches near the CA border that go up to a 70 mph speed limit, at which point the Oregonians strap on their protective helmets to prevent the G-forces from melting the skin on their faces off. Slower pace of life = slower speed limits, but I'm really okay with that. We're proud and happy to have made a home for ourselves in this new state and are always happy to come back, even though we miss all the wonderful folks we left behind in California. So I'll close this epic post by saying Happy Holidays to you all, although it's July and we're closer to this year's holiday season than last year's, but hopefully I have inspired us to make plans for 2009!

The Heat is On

We are back! Andy, Alton and I just got back from a fab tour of family and friends in California. We traveled by plane, car and train, were gone for 11 days, stayed at about 6 different places and took more than 1,000 pictures. Wow! Back home in Hillsboro it's going to be more than 100 degrees some days this week, so we are just hanging out and catching up on laundry before our weekend visitor Aunt Cari arrives.
Stay tuned for more posts about our trip, but in the meantime here's a teaser for you. And oh yes, they just keep getting cuter.

Pet Sounds

Sharing a few favorite animal noises. (Don't worry, the keyboard is unplugged.)

Body Language

Here is Alton showing you where all of his parts and features are!

Baby Boogie

Alton steps it up a notch in the dancing department. Perhaps getting ready for Christa and Paul's wedding reception?

Just another day at the park!

Today (the 11th of July) was a fun day. Some fooling around at home. Some wandering around the park and then a bike ride!

Trying on one of Daddy's shirts.


Re-engineering the drinking fountain.


Playing in the small creek at the park.


Showing off the sweater Mama made for him.


And Minerva got to go to the park, too.


All ready for a bike ride!

Yard Time

Ah, a Handy Andy's work is never done. First dilemma: digging down for the beautiful paving stone patio left our "interesting" back fence line a little jagged-looking and exposed some dirt.

Andy to the rescue! He and his dad sketched out an idea: get the same type of boards used for the fence, but in a greater width, so that they will cover the wonky line and weather the same color as the rest of the fence. Great! Brian and Alexa came to town for a visit two weekends ago, and so while Alexa and I went shopping for her belated bday present, Andy and Brian fell to and got the boards cut to size and put in place. Thank you, Brian and Andy! Beautiful work!


Just in time for the next project. The dilemma: curious baby fingers! The most dangerous things are always the most interesting, as Alton demonstrates by wanting to touch the A/C unit with its whirring fan (it's off in this picture).

Right now the non-patio half of the yard is just dirt, but eventually it will be grass and play equipment for Alton, so we want to prevent contact with the dangerous A/C unit. Andy to the rescue again! He designed and built a fence to go around the whole unit, including a lip at the top, to minimize baby exploration and maximize airflow for cooling. It's even lined with chicken wire (all one piece, so no sharp edges!) so no little fingers can poke through. What a genius! Thank you, Daddy!