A Quick Trip to Seattle

We zipped up to Seattle yesterday to see my little brother, Shane, for a few hours. He is volunteering for a disaster-relief organization and is temporarily stationed in Seattle helping to fix up a donated ship. We got to see the ship (here are the kids at the helm) and then we took Shane for a nice tour of Seattle. (Read in between the lines - we changed our plans because of the weather and drove ALL OVER trying to find a kid-friendly place to eat. Thanks to cell phones and family members with the internet, we finally managed to net a restaurant, and lucky Uncle Shane got to spend a bunch of time in the back of a mini-van with kids. :-) The boys were so happy to see him and talked his ear off the whole time, and Ascha was happy to see a new face from the vantage point of her carseat, so I guess it could have been worse. :-) After lunch we went to a park on Lake Washington for a few minutes (it wasn't exactly a balmy day - it had snowed quite a bit that morning on the drive up), then dropped Shane off at his ship, and zipped back home. It was a long day but it was SO good to see Shane and hang out for a bit.

In other news, Ascha has her third tooth and is crawling VERY quickly these days. She still prefers to say "ba" (or "bra," which we're SURE means "brother" :-)  over any other consonant combination, but every once in a while she'll let a "da" or a "ha" or even a "ma" slip out. With teething has come another round of interrupted sleep at night - she's been up at least four times a night lately. We're really hoping that after her second top tooth comes in, we'll get another reprieve. Thankfully, she doesn't have any sicknesses on top of teething this time, so hopefully a full night of sleep is only a few more days away.

Aric is picking up steam in the reading department. He's getting very good at sounding things out (IF he doesn't guess - he's a VERY talented guesser, which leads to some amusing "interpretations"). His latest funny phrase came the other day when the sun was shining and the boys were enjoying popsicles on the back deck... "Ummm....Did you know??....My teeth are allergic to popsicles."

Taylor is going along with kindergarten and growing up. He's such a dichotomy right now - he seems to be both little boy and big boy at the same time, all rolled into one package. He is changing before our very eyes and although the vestiges of babyhood have been gone for a long time, we're losing some other part of "little-boyhood" right now and I mourn as I see it less and less. However, at the same time, we are so proud of the kind-hearted and helpful big boy he is becoming.