Happy Holidays part 1

Whew! December flew by in a flash and now we're already into 2020! How the heck did that happen?!

Our holidays were spent, as usual, in good ole LA where we had plenty of fun hanging out with family and enjoyed the lovely sunshine. The first half of the trip was spent with Grammie and Grandpa at their house in Sierra Madre where we filled our days with exploring the neighborhood, had a nice outing to the California Science Center (pretty neat!) and then got ready for Christmas. Here's some quick snaps of our trip!

Oranges galore! Soon they will be ready to sell at the market!

We tried a new-to-us brewery in Sierra Madre called Route Rogers. This is the Guava and Raspberry ale.

Evie didn't want to go so it was just Nora that hung out with us at the brewery. We let her try "unicorn bao". The pink was filled with bbq pork and the orange one had mushrooms and eggplant.

Grandpa showed us all his neat photos from when they first got married and when Scott and Missy were little.

A trip is never complete without a ride in Grandpa's truck.

We took a short hike up the canyon.

Pretty views!

Bonus that there was minimal whining from this girl on our trek home.

We helped Samantha celebrate her 21st birthday (again!).

Uncle Albert made his delicious homemade tong yuan soup!

After dinner, we rushed back to make it for the annual candlelight Christmas walk.

It's always a fun tradition that brings the whole neighborhood out.

At the Science Museum, we looked at ourselves with an infrared camera. Notice how hot Nora and Scott are!

Nora liked the aquarium exhibits

I thought seeing the Endeavor space ship and other space things like this capsule were super cool.

There's a naked chef in the kitchen making cookies! Our annual tradition with Grammy.

Christmas Eve - ready for dinner!

Happy on Christmas morning.

Comments

Happy new year!!

Goodness, it's already 2025! It's been a really long time since we posted! We had a very lazy new year. We flew back from LA on the evening of the 31st so spent the last remaining hours of 2024 cozying up on the couch and then fell asleep before it even hit midnight! On New Years day, we slept in, cleaned up the house and then did a quick hike the next day. All in all, a good start to the year! Nora's new blanket hoodie. Cold and muddy trails. We're not in LA anymore! We hiked the Primrose trail that follows Coal Creek.

1 week checkup

We took Nora to her one week check up today and guess what? We have a porker on our hands! She weighed in at a whopping 6 lbs. 5.5 oz. That's 2.5 oz more than her birth weight! They want the baby to be back at birth weight within 2 weeks so she beat that milestone pretty handily. Hooray! So far, she's been better than Evie at eating (she doesn't take nearly as long, although she falls asleep VERY often) but she's not as good as Evie at pooping. Poor thing always seems to have tummy issues - she's very squirmy and fussy when she doesn't burp or poop. The doc doesn't think it's a big problem though since she still has lots of wet diapers, but we'll have to keep a better eye on it now. We'll have another doctor check up (with shots!) next week.

Salmon

The other weekend, Scott arranged for us to get a private tour of the Salmon hatchery on Orcas Island. It's surprising that we've been going to Orcas for over 10 years now and never noticed this place before! The tour started down by the waters along Eastsound where Mike, the facilities manager, showed us where the Salmon come in from the ocean ever year. There is a fish ladder down there and a little dock that lets them catch the spawning salmon and they can quickly fertilize the eggs. Then we drove up to the main hatchery where he walked us through where the eggs incubate until they are little hatchlings before being moved to larger swimming pools. It was an interesting little tour to learn all about the life of the salmon. This hatchery focuses on Chinook (King) salmon, and out of the 800,000 baby salmon they release back to the water, about 800-900 come back to spawn. The rest are eaten up by whales in the Pacific ocean or caught by commercial fisherman out in the open w...

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