Simpsons in Seattle

For the past week or so, the air quality here has been horrible due to the Oregon wildfires blowing up our way. Our air quality index was in the 150-200+ range for the better part of a week! It bummed us out because we had to cancel our camping trip to Deception Pass that we had booked back in January.  While we stayed in, we found ways to amuse ourselves including FINALLY getting the girls to watch the Star Wars trilogy. I think they were so desperate for screen time they finally relented to Scott's badgering them to watch it. They ended up enjoying it quite a bit and have already been asking us about watching the other episodes. YAY for the small wins during these crazy times, right?  Hazy hazy view of our street This is the view of downtown Bellevue getting off the 405 exit. This isn't even a mile from downtown! Scott passed time by brewing beer in our kitchen. This is the disaster that was our kitchen one night. He had so much weight and water in the sink that it started to

We did an ~22 mile (flat) bike ride a few weeks ago that I forgot to post about. Nora's little leggies were pumping hard to keep up with all of us but she did great! It didn't hurt that she was incentivized with a pit stop at the half way mark at a donut shop, which is the only spot I took picture at. It was a last minute decision to quell the kids' complaining and it was a good choice - the donut shop had fancy interesting options like Chocolate Mint donuts and it was reasonably priced. We may have to do this again!  Resting and eating Nora's mint chocolate donut. Cookies and cream donut. Nora was so pooped that she fell asleep immediately after we got in the car.  

School officially started for the two girls last Tuesday, September 1st. The girls were excited for the day but it felt like a bit of a let down for me - ushering them to sit down in front of a screen downstairs isn't quite the same as dropping them off at school!  Nora loved her first day- she said her teacher was nice and class was super easy. Evie said her first day was okay, but she was very happy to see a lot of her friends in class with her. I sort of wonder if the school put friends into the same class on purpose to make remote learning a bit more fun because I was surprised to see how many of her group of friends were in this class with her. Now that we are one week in, the shininess of school has worn off and the girls have even separated so that Evie does her classes up in her room while Nora is using my desk downstairs. We've gotten the hang (mostly) of setting Alexa alarms so they both know when to log back into their zoom classes.   

Nora was walking around today with the ipad and her earphones rocking out to the music. She was bopping around and when Evie and I listened in, I was really surprised to hear it was classical music!  Anyway, Evie said:  Hey Mom! Wouldn't it be so cool if there was this little device, that was like your phone except not, and you can just listen to music on it?  and I said: You mean like a CD player or walkman?  Evie: huh? Me: oh nevermind. But I think have just the thing! Guess what I dug out and the girls proceeded to go ga-ga over it and listened to a bunch of old 90s music? My old iPod! They were so impressed with it. Too bad they don't make these anymore.  

We just got back yesterday from our last summer hurrah before school started today. The week we took off to hang out on the Olympic Peninsula (mainly in the town of Seabrook) flew by so fast!  Our trip was with the Wong family again, who we went with to Banff last year . It's nice having friends to hang out with, and it was easy to split up and go different ways if some kids didn't want to go to the beach, or if some of the parents wanted to go do harder biking trails, etc.  The main parts of our trips were either exploring the Olympic National Park or hanging out in the town of Seabrook, where we rented a house for the week. In the National Park, we went up to Hurricane Ridge, which is I think their peak, hiked around a couple of different rainforests (Kalaloch and Quinnalt) and had a picnic lunch at Ruby Beach. We would have explored more but a lot of the areas we wanted to check out like La Push (yes, Jacob's home!) and Cape Flattery (the furthest northwest tip of the st