Skip to main content

Hiking buddies

By

I should have done this sooner, all it took to break the girls away from their screens and books to join me in the outdoors were a few candies and money (well not really money, they want “points” to use towards LEGO rewards). For two days straight the girls have willingly gone out with me on local hiking trails near our house without a single complaint... and they claim to be having a ton of fun. We have been exploring streams, waterfalls, and interesting looking rocks. We’re trying to keep our social distance when we pass hikers and I have even trained the girls to hold their breath as long as they can when walking past strangers. So far so good. Perhaps we will try masks on our hikes next.





With all this outdoor time (and the prospect of more points) the girls have also joined me in doing some spring weeding and gardening. They even helped me clean up a small tree in our yard to use for climbing. I love listening to their little pretend stories while hanging out in the trees. Yesterday it was about two little girl entrepreneurs who became billionaires!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Family time

By
I had to do a quick trip to LA towards the end of July to say goodbye to my Uncle Pang, who passed away a few weeks earlier. I have fond memories of fun cousin time at his house in Palos Verdes and Uncle Pang taking us to the beach when we were younger. I remember how he delighted in making us kids squeal with laughter by pretending the car ride was a rolleroaster - we'd take sharp turns and all of us kids would slide to one side of his Volvo station wagon or he'd slow the car down to a roll and we'd all chant that we couldn't let the car stop and it would inch slowly forward at a stoplight.  Although it was a sad reason to get together, I think he would be happy to know that the weekend was also a wonderful get together with family. Because it was fairly last minute, none of the kids flew over which meant us "adult cousins" were able to have long talks and linger over food. Kin and Meredith were able to host a summertime bbq at their house and we had a nice t
1 comment
Read more

Japan trip

By
We got back from Japan about a week ago and we're still talking about what a great trip it was!  Japan has never been super high on my places to visit but for a lot of reasons (I've never been, it's clean, it's safe, it's different) we took the plunge and booked it as our summer vacation this year. It helped that our friends, the Wongs, went last year, raved about it and loved it so much they were going again and we were able to coordinate so that some of our trip overlapped with theirs. It helped even more that the yen is at a 10-year low (maybe all time low?) against the dollar, which, aside from airfare, made everything quite affordable.  Look how low the yen is! We lucked out that it kept falling after we booked our tix in Dec. Since this was our first big overseas trip since COVID and with kids (or, lets face it, SINCE kids), I dove into prepping for our trip - including trying to keep up my Duolingo streak of learning Japanese for at least a few minutes everyd
1 comment
Read more

Miss Evie becomes a teenager

By
EEEK! We officially have a teenager in our house!  I can't believe our little Evie is now 13 years old. I can still see her as a little girl saying "Swiper no swiping!"  For her birthday this year, she and a few of the neighborhood girls went to get their nails done at the salon nearby. She doesn't remember the last time she got her nails professionally done ( back in 2016! ) so she was pretty excited about it. She picked a very pretty teal color. Afterwards, the girls had some cake.  To celebrate her actual birthday, her ask was for tv time, shopping and sushi. So after a morning spent hanging out in from the tv, we headed to Bellevue Square mall where guess what? She got a phone! Technically, I got a new phone and handed down my old phone to her. We spent a good 3 hours doing all the transfers but she was very patient about it and grinning from ear to ear when we went to dinner that night.  At 13, Evie has become a very stereotypical teenage girl - she loves clothes
1 comment
Read more