Frog Baby Shoe Models

"Hey you, check out my shoes!"

Cute shoes, huh? My kids are modeling these specially imported shoes from Taiwan. (My Dad brought them back as gifts for them) They are kind of like those Croc shoes material, but a bit stiffer. Adele wears hers all the time.

I get moms stopping me often, telling me how cute these shoes are, or asking where I got them.

You like them? You want a pair? You can't get them in the United States... unless you know ME. (Or my sister, so for any of my family and friends in UTAH who are interested, I can hook you up with her).

They come in Pink, Green, Blue, and Yellow. Christmas is right around the corner. I have very limited supplies. Let me know if you are interested...

Halloween

Adele is a Princess. Samuel is an unwilling superhero.
Didn't want the boots or the cape.
Finally I distracted him with some Baby Einstein. See how it's a wonder pets cape? (It's actually Adele's cape that she got from a birthday party).


Adele was very specific about how she wanted her pumpkin carved this year. Last year, we carved these fancy pumpkins, where Danielle made Cinderella, and I did Prince Phillip.

All year long, she was saying how last Halloween, she wished she could have a pumpkin with two eyes and a nose and a mouth. All that work, and really, all she'd wanted was a traditional jack-o-lantern! So this year, we were sure to get it right. Specifically, she wanted triangle eyes, a circle nose, and a curved mouth with teeth. Thank goodness she wanted these more simple designs. All we had to carve with was a butter knife.

Then she wanted Samuel's to have triangle eyes, a triangle nose, and a curved mouth with NO teeth.

Aaron took the kids to a science museum on Saturday (Halloween).
He and Adele entered a pumpkin weighing contest. She wanted to put down 40 lbs., but he encouraged her to write 5 lbs. They came in at 2nd place. She won a prize, she picked coke bottle glasses. She was excited that they would match her doctor set glasses, and that she and Samuel could be able to wear them at the same time.


Me: "I will get the camera if you will get your toothbrush and start brushing your teeth." Hence, the picture of the glasses while she is brushing her teeth. Wasn't hard to get Samuel in the picture, he climbs right up on the stool with Adele when she brushes her teeth. He loves to be involved. She is good at sharing (with him) and never pushes him off the stool or complains about him being there (like she does with Dawna).

Elsewhere and Portland

The kids got to pick out a pumpkin from Grandma and Grandpa's patch. They'd cut the pumpkins and put them in the barn, under some straw, to keep them warm. So they said to just go find some under the straw in the barn. It was fun, like a game. The barn was dark, and we didn't know which stall to look in. When we did find it, we still didn't know if there were pumpkins under all that straw, and where exactly to look. So rather than picking pumpkins this year, we also had to find them!

We enjoyed Jason and Courtney's wedding. Jason is Aaron's cousin. Jason fainted during the vows, which was fun, because his brother Jacob caught him, and Jason popped right back up - he actually "feinted." He was telling Courtney, during the vows, that that was the way he felt when they met. He really got us all, big gasps from everyone. I guess those boys were always big jokers.

Samuel in his prayer pose. Folding his arms, bowing his head (well, his whole body) and closing his eyes.

Astoria

Ecola State Park near Cannon Beach
Aaron had to hold Samuel back, so he wouldn't touch the catipillar.

They love to wrestle

Astoria Column.
We climbed it, 166 steps.
(According to a guy coming down while we climbed up)

We could see the valley from up high.

Oh Health Me

Help me with Health.

I waited to schedule my kids' well examinations because I wanted to change our health insurance to an Oregon plan. After all, the last time I took one of them in (when we lived in Oregon back in Jan-Mar), the visit (which involved looking at my son for 10 seconds and never touching him, all done by the nurse practitioner "oh he has a rash? It's no big deal. It's just __") cost us over $200. And, since we just don't live in CA anymore, we obviously need to switch.

Well, the underwriting for this new health plan has taken over 2 months. It's ridiculous. We ALMOST have it... just waiting on one more medical record. Never get sick if you plan on changing insurance, it is such a headache to get on a different plan. I mean, insurances don't want to offer health insurance to anyone but the SUPER healthy. Anyway, with all this attention to swine flu, and knowing tons of people living around us who already have had it, and with stories of hospitalizations, I figured I better get the kids vaccinated. After all, if they get sick enough with the flu to go to the doctor, that one visit could cost us over $200. (We pay everything to a very high deductible, except for their yearly exams and shots). Not worth it, if we can prevent it, right? It seems like a common thing to go in to see your doctor when you are sick with the flu. And I have heard plenty of stories of kids being dehydrated and needed to go to the hospital to rehydrate with IV fluids. Can't imagine how much THAT would cost...

Well, I have called 2 doctors offices (that have several doctors). Pediatricians, family practices, etc. No one is accepting new patients. I called another and they said maybe, they will get back to me. Okay, any day now. AND they are out of swine flu vacc AND seasonal flu vacc. I called the local pharmacies. They don't offer them to kids. I called the county. They won't give kids under 3 the swine flu vacc (which rules out my son) and won't give kids over 3 the seasonal vacc (which rules out my daughter). So they can each have one of each vaccine. So I was running out of options... no place to get my kids their flu vaccines, their immunizations. CAN'T let them get sick. I finally just hung a bottle of hand sanitizer on my belt loop and went crazy with it when we dropped Aaron at the mall today (the kids wanted to play on the germ happy indoor play structures). I'm not always a germ-a-phobe. Mostly when I know there's flu going around, schools are closing because of it, and we can't afford to get sick with more than a cold.

So finally, I just called my kids' primary care pediatrician back in CA. They set up me with an appointment to see them, nice and easy. They have both vaccines available. So the kids get to see the doctor and have lots of shots (due for immunizations too) when we come home for the holidays.

Our ugly morph and my parents visit

Aren't you glad our kids don't look like this?

Aaron's forehead, my eyes, top of my nose,
bottom of his nose, top of my lips.
His chin, part of my hair.
Woo, that is ugly!
(We were at the Science Works museum
and experimented with light and mirrors)

My parents came to visit us this weekend. We went to Mill creek falls. Last time, we only hiked to the viewpoint because of all the snow. This time we were excited to hike down the canyon into the Avenue of the Boulders. Giant moss covered boulders lined either side of the trail. Huge canopies of yellow and green trees with their changing colors made the light golden, and it felt as those we were in a dream. Then we visited Natural Bridge by Union creek. The river flows under the lava, there are these natural lava beds (much like the ones in Lava Beds national monument that we just visited) except these ones have the creek (which is a very big creek and feels more like a river) running through it. Then, since we were so far down 62, we decided we might as well use our National Parks pass and scoot on over to Crater Lake for a quick peek.

We all held hands. Samuel grabbed Adele's.

Barr Creek Falls

Some of that golden light behind us -
it never shows up in pictures as well as what we really saw.
Crater Lake
(My parents hadn't been back here since they took the whole family as kids. And they confirmed that we did NOT take a boat to the island, as an unnamed sister thinks we did. At least, Mom and Dad and I have no memory of that. The boat we took was most likely to Shasta Caverns, which is by Shasta Lake in Northern California).

Kite flying

Larry and Cheryl came and brought Adele a kite for her birthday. Adele has been excited all week long about flying that kite. So today, Aaron decided to take her out flying, even though it wasn't windy.

But what a kite! She threw it up, and up up up it went into the sky! Then she flew it herself. It was such a great kite, it seemed to want to stay up by itself. I still don't know where the wind was, but it was sure fun to watch the kids fly this kite.