We went to Portland for a weekend to join Brent as he was presenting at a conference. The thing Ava was most excited for was watching TV in the bed. This picture is from within 2 minutes of walking in the door:
Our hotel was right in the heart of downtown and the first evening I took the kids on a walk around downtown and to walk by the river. It was nice to spend time with them and not feel rushed and saying "hurry hurry!" like I always do. We just wandered around and sat down if they wanted to sit down. I love this picture of Coen- always looking at Ava to copy her.
The beautiful river:
Ava singing "Proud to be an American"
We stopped at a pizza restaurant for them and made a picnic at the hotel which they thought was so fun.
Mickey and Minnie jammies:
I decided the hotel was a pretty good time to work on potty-training Coen ;)
On Friday we went down to the OMSI museum and spent a few hours in the children's section which is so cool. Coen played with this goo under a black light for 30 minutes straight.
The kids loved the huge sand box:
At the end of the day Ava told me that her most favorite thing of the day was pretending like she was a chipmunk:
That evening when Brent got home we went on a walk to get dinner at a rice restaurant since my stomach was not handling the fast food well. Ava was so disappointed in our dinner since she hates rice!
On Saturday our friends the Wilsons came up and I watched their kids while they did a session at the temple. We played school and had a picnic lunch.
At one point Ava and Max put their babies on the bed and told me that I was their babysitter and that they were going on a date. They crack me up.
We then went back to the OMSI with the Wilsons where the kids were happy to play again!
This is the view from the OMSI:
That evening we had another picnic dinner in our hotel. The kids discovered the show "Paw Patrol" and fell in love.
Brent presented on "Franchising the Disney-verse." In other words, analyzed the reasons/motivations behind Disney creating a Disney canon of their animated works.
The city was so pretty in spring!
After Brent's conference, we picked him up and went to dinner at Chick Fil-A. They were doing a party for the anniversary of the store and we got to spin the wheel and got some free kids meals! Ava was so excited to see the cow.
After dinner we went to Kohls and bought Coen some underwear since he was excited about potty training. He looked so cute in his superhero underwear!
On Sunday we walked to church a few blocks away from our hotel. It was a tiny little branch but still felt like home.
As we were walking back to our hotel we passed by the art museum and saw they had an exhibit that we had been meaning to go to. The exhibit featured scenery and puppets from the stop-motion studio, Laika.
We went inside to check it out and found they were having one of their two free days a year that day! We hurried back to the hotel to change and check out, then came back. This house is from Coraline and was my favorite thing there:
This scene was really cool all lit up, and you can tell Coen was not as excited as we were about it all!
It was fascinating to learn how they create the puppet dolls in the movies, with different facial pieces they put on to make the dolls be able to make all sorts of expressions and to "speak."
It was looking at a miniature world! It was amazing seeing all the detail and sewing that went into the clothes.
The parts to Paranorman's face:
Coraline herself:
The art museum also had all sorts of art and I sneaked away to take in some Monets. These water lilies make me feel rejuvenated.
After the museum we walked around and heard this live jazz music coming from a park. As we walked up on the scene, the crowd was pulsing with the music and we could see they were all semi-professionals. They were so fun to watch, doing the swing, jitterbug, etc!
The kids were so sad to leave Portland, because they were sad to leave the Paw Patrol show. Haha. We drove home to Eugene in time for my appointment with the Bishop where he called me to be Primary President. There were a lot of emotions there all at once- overwhelmed, humbled, peaceful, happy, and a little more overwhelmed.
Ava was being such an emotional roller coaster on our walk:
We had such nice weather and played at the park a lot of days with our friends. Coen was cracking me up here, acting like a gentleman with his arms behind his back as he watched his friend on her phone. Then carefully put one arm up to point at something.
While I was shopping with the kids one day there was a crazy hail storm and just buckets of water fell from the sky afterward. We just waited for it to calm down to walk out to the car.
Brent came to my sharing-time lesson at church as "Joseph Smith" and the kids were enthralled! He taught them about translating the Book of Mormon.
And that concludes April of 2018!
No comments:
Post a Comment