Simpsons in Seattle

We had a nice evening hanging with some of old PEPs buddies! It was a wonderful, warm evening out by the water at the Mercer Island beach club where the King family are members. The kids had fun splashing in the pool, jumping into the lake, roasting smores and just running around the grounds while the adults soaked in one of the last 9pm sunsets for the year. I can't believe how grown these kids are! Seems like just yesterday we were reminiscing about highs and lows of being new parents. Some photos of now vs then below! Enjoying the lake views! Moonrise over Renton Evie and Vivian Evie, Nora, Cecily, Vivian, Winston, Jude and Callum One of our first PEPs meetings! The kids couldn't even sit up yet. See Evie? One of our last get togethers - a 4th of July picnic. Viv and Evie in a double stroller.

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