I have started using our nice point and shoot lately so I don’t have any mobile shots to post today (not that I’m really good about doing a random shots post every Friday, but I try), but I liked these so I thought I’d post them.
Lily looking at the lions.
The Fam.
Lily and Waldo looking at the giraffes.
Lily doing her witch face.
Cutie.
Lily on a tiger.
This weekend we tossed on Lily’s 2012 Halloween t-shirt (I get her a new one every year) and headed to The Patch. It’s the same Pumpkin Patch that we went to last year. We really liked it and will probably keep going year after year for as long as we are here.
I have a thing for white pumpkins so we found a couple that were the perfect size.
On a side note this trip to the pumpkin patch was the first time I’ve used my real camera since July. I could hardly believe it when I was looking at the memory card. Only phone pictures since fricking July. I’ve got to remember to grab the real camera more often.
This is my favorite picture from the Pumpkin Patch.
We ended up coming home with the two white pumpkins for painting and one pretty good side orange one for carving.
While we were paying for our pumpkins we went into their little store and saw Waldo’s brother’s honey for sale. It’s raw, unfiltered, local, yummy honey. This was the first time we’ve seen it for sale anywhere, it was pretty cool. I also bought one of their home grown loofa’s and came home and cut it in half because I thought it was too big. Huge mistake, now I have this tiny loofa that does nothing but annoy me because it’s hard to hold on too. Live and learn.
We had such a nice time together, as is the norm. Now I can’t wait to carve pumpkins and put Lily in her witch’s costume and go trick or treating.
Here’s part 1 of our little vacation to visit friends in Montana.
We woke up on our first full day back in Whitefish and after a little work for both of us* we went to visit our friends Anthony and Maggie. We spent a few hours with them and had a blast. I don’t know what on earth was wrong with me, I didn’t take a single picture of them. I can’t believe it. I did take a few pictures of Lily and Waldo while they were playing video games there. Silly me.
After a few hours with Anthony and Maggie we headed to see Jack; who is the main person that we wanted to see. While he didn’t stop me from taking pictures of him, he threatened bad things if any of the pictures ended up on the internet. So boo. Here are some pictures of Lily instead.
While Waldo, Jack and our friend Malcolm talked about boring boy stuff Lily and I played with her dress up Olivia set.
Lily has only seen Jack once in the last two years, but she’s heard so much about Uncle Jack that she was so comfortable with him. She wanted nothing more than to play with him or at least near him. She wanted to show off, it was really cute.
That first night in Whitefish Jack and Waldo went out and played neerdy games with other boys and Lily and I hung out in the hotel. The next day we went to breakfast with Jack. Lily was true to form and wanted to show off her cute Hello Kitty.
Later that day we decided to take Lily to the park to feed some ducks. We bought some cracked corn (I had no idea this was a real thing, I thought it was just part of a nursery rhyme) from the gas station across the street from the park. The ducks liked it, but I wish we would have had bread to feed them. Ducks seem to like it better. Oh well, it was about the experience and spending time together, not the duck food.
BTW Lily’s shirt says ‘My Mom is Totally Awesome’ because you know she is. 🙂
This next picture is my favorite of the whole trip.
This one comes in a close second.
You will have to employ your imagination a bit here and add some cute pictures of Lily, Waldo and Jack on a bridge feeding ducks. Or a really really good picture of Jack squatting so he’s at Lily’s level talking to her while she feeds ducks (my 4th fav pic of the trip) or the three of them at a picnic table. He’s making you miss out on a lot of really good pictures. Luckily for me I have printed those along with a lot of the ones you see here on my blog into a collage that I love.
After feeding the ducks got old we had a little picnic and Lil feed the rest of the cracked corn to the sea gulls. They were very interested in the corn.
That evening Waldo and Jack went out to get drinks and Lily and I did the hotel hang out thing again. He didn’t get full on drunk because he’s not that into drinking, but he got a nice buzz and I got some really cute buzzed texts from Waldo.
I should take the time to mention that Waldo had been coming down with cold symptoms all day and by the end of the night Lily was right on his heels. This was such a bummer because we had decided to leave Montana a day early so that we could drive to Portland and visit Becky (my BFF) and with this cold we weren’t sure how that was going to go.
The next morning we were suppose to have breakfast with our friend Jess and Jamison and their little Teagan. But by then the threatened colds had blossomed completely so we called off breakfast because I hate spreading germs especially to little ones. Instead we spread our germs to the general public and had breakfast at the restaurant Jack works at so we could get one more goodbye with him.
Jack made Lily a butterfly pancake. He made her a very over the top Mickey Mouse pancake the first morning, but I didn’t get a picture of it before Waldo cut it up.
I’m betting the kids at the other table were jealous since all they got were standard round pancakes. One of the benefits of knowing people in high places. When Jack came out to see if Lily liked her pancake we were able to give him the little canvas she drew him. I didn’t get a picture, but it was really cute and she wrote Mama on it all by herself. She added an extra letter, but hey she’s 3.
On our way out of town we stopped and saw our friend Gil for a few minutes (he was in the middle of a meeting) and then we headed out. Our plan was to get as far as Spokane that night and then get to Portland the next afternoon. While we were driving to Spokane we discussed our options and we made one of the hardest decisions ever and that was to go home after Spokane and not to Portland. It just wasn’t fair to Lily to spend another sleepless night in a hotel and it wasn’t fair to me either. At the time it was the best and really only right decision to make for our kiddo. The plan was to go to Portland for the weekend in September. Well that had to get pushed back because Becky was going to be moving so we decided that Mid-October was best. Now it looks like that won’t happen either. I’m so bummed and wish that we would have said ‘lets go to Portland anyway, screw the kid’, but oh well.
Here’s a view of how we spent the night at the motel in Spokane. Note the tissues and sad people.
Overall this was a great vacation, the only thing that would have made it better was getting to see more friends. I can’t wait to do it again.
*I guess you could call it job security, but Waldo and I are the only ones that do certain parts of our jobs so we still have to do them on vacation, sick days, every day really. Excluding weekends and some national holidays I haven’t had a full day off in over 3 years. I guess I can’t really complain because a full day for me is about 3 hours, but still.
***All pictures on this trip were taken with our phones so some of the indoor pictures are a little…bad. Sorry.
**Edited to add: Waldo informed me that my sequence of events is a bit off. I decided I don’t care. I got all of the important facts, just maybe not in the right order.
Lily’s playing with the Sandra Boynton book App Blue Hat, Green Hat. I suggest all of you buy this app, it rocks and it’s given me 3 or 4 different 30-45 minute stretches of mostly Mama time.
This is Lily’s newest puppy. His name is Goodbye Puppy. Waldo says he gave her dozens of suggestions for names and finally she said ‘her name is Goodbye Puppy, like Hello Kitty’.
Lily says this is a drawing of me. I think I was having a bad hair day or something.
Lil’s obsessed with bandaging us all up. She’s using blue painters tape. At first she only used little bits on her stuffed animals, her obsession has grown to the adults in our house and very long strips of ‘bandaids’.
I don’t know what’s going on with my face, but Lil decided I was very hurt all over.
We found the world dirtiest ride on toy outside a Rite Aid. This ride was followed by handfuls of hand sanitizer. Yuck.
I like to have Lily decorate envelopes before I send greeting card out. This was a card for my friend Becky.
I broke Lily’s art desk and set out on the great desk search from Craigslist. I found this one, new in the box, but about 10 years old. Whatever it’s new and Lil loves it.
Lily and Waldo were downstairs eating lunch and Waldo just came upstairs and told me “Lily just said ‘Daddy, do you know what the point of jelly is? The point of jelly is it tastes like a treat”. I almost fell out of my chair I was laughing so hard.
If you were to ask Lily if she wanted candy she would give you a blank look. We give her sweets so rarely that we just call them all treats and so that is what she knows them as. And ice cream of course, everyone knows what ice cream is.
