portland

Porter and I took a little trip last week to Portland to visit Shelley and Olive (and Jeremy but he was working most of the time). It is beautiful and green up there. It was nice to see their new home. I loved it! It's super nice. We mostly did activities for the enjoyment of Porter and Olive. But hey, when they're enjoying themselves, we have fun too. We got there Wednesday evening so of course the first thing we did was watch SYTYCD. Thursday we went to a reading group at the local library. A lady reads some books and we sing songs and play. Shelley had this genius idea to sign Porter up for a reading activity thing that she and Olive were doing. You just do things on your own at home with the kids and mark off squares when you complete activities. You receive different rewards for completing parts. So, we ended up getting a coupon for free swim at the pool, free cupcakes at Saint Cupcake, a $5 gift certificate for children's books, and two for one at the Portland Children's Museum. That place was perfect for the kids. They loved it! We spaced out the free activities over the 6 days I was there. Check them out in this picture, staring at the frosting on each other's lips. I guess it's not such a good idea to feed your kid a cupcake with a bunch of sticky blue frosting before boarding an airplane. "You got a little something right there." Sunday night, we ate dinner at Jeremy's Mom's house. Shelley mentioned that she was a great cook. We had seafood deluxe chowder! It had clams, halibut, salmon and shrimp. I'm usually a little nervous when it comes to seafood because I'm pretty particular about the flavor but it was so good. We all enjoyed it. Porter was scarfing it too. He ate lots of clams and potatoes. It was funny because I asked Jeremy the night before what his favorite food was and he said, "Salmon, clams and muscles." Shelley made lots of delicious food too. In fact I asked for her grocery list and a recipe and I've already copied two of the dinners we had. There is a park just a block from Shelley's house where they turn on some water on certain Thursdays during the summer between 3-6 only if it's 80 degrees or over. So, it doesn't happen that frequently. The volunteers who turn the water on also bring tons of balls to play with and crafts for the kids to make. We decided to give it a shot. When we got there, the water wasn't on. Come to find out, the volunteers had a new copy of a key and couldn't get the lock undone after trying for an hour. They left the lock for a little while to go try and make a phone call. I happened upon the lock and stared at it a while with my fingers fidgeting together like Dennis the Menace. I looked around and didn't see anyone watching. I thought, "What are they going to do if I give it a try, yell at me?" Shelley saw me get my hands on the lock and started encouraging me and saying she was going to laugh if I got it. Another mom came a little closer to watch and later told me that she was thinking to herself, "oh please! oh please!" I ended up popping it open.

Here are some pictures at the children's museum. Olive hopped up on the stool to be a checker at the grocery store. Porter joined a band with some homegirls who were rappin'. Some of the rooms included water, construction, music, dr. office, dig pit (with thousands of little rubber pieces to dig in), grocery store, dentist office, tunnels to crawl through and puppets.

This swimming pool had a fun slide Shelley and I took turns going down. We kept stealing kid's floating devices not knowing which of them belonged to the pool.