Category Archives: life

Going Once, Going Twice

Puddletown Hall 2015I need to come up with an auction item for my kids’ school fundraiser in the next 6 days. It should be something handmade or local/edible. I could do a gift certificate for something, but I don’t like bidding for things that have a price tag literally on them.

Some ideas I’ve been considering:

  • Coffee basket
  • Fairy house (we did this last year)
  • Framed watercolor (I’m not a great artist; this would need to be a coloring book sheet from one of my grown-up coloring books. That said, I’ve framed some for our kids rooms.)
  • Bottle of wine (lots of people already do this)
  • Embroidered flour sack towels

There’s so much potential for weirdness with handmade donations to things like your kids’ school. What if your aesthetic doesn’t match that of the other parents? What if your thing doesn’t sell? What if everyone else donates expensive stuff and you give homemade granola (I did this in 2013. I make good granola, but I still think of that year as a bit of a failure)?

Do you buy stuff at silent auctions? What are you excited to get? What do you hate having to bid on out of pity/guilt?

Most importantly, do you have a suggestion for something I should donate? 🙂

 

Greeting the dawn

love birds
the sun crests the mountains
pre-dawn

I’m still too wound up from organizing Press Publish Phoenix this weekend to sleep very well; woke up at 3:30am this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. Since I’m lucky enough to be at a pretty hotel in Phoenix right now, I thought I’d enjoyed my pre-dawn hours making lists and ruminating on the events over coffee on the rooftop sky deck at the Clarendon Hotel.

Arizona, you have a pretty sunrise. Keep doing what you’re doing.  

We booked our camp sites!

Yep, that’s right — we’re headed to the Oregon Coast in August for 6 nights of camping! Two nights at Fort Stevens, 2 nights at Nehalem State Park, and 2 nights at Beverly Beach. We thought about hitting Champoeg on the way back to Portland, but with two little kids in tow, I’m fairly sure we’re going to run out of clean clothes on Wednesday. 😉  Pickings are a little slim, but all the good sites are NOT booked up 100% yet, shew!

Now we can plan more carefully what we want to do when we’re not on the beach — which will probably not be a lot of the time, unless the weather is just stinking. Currently I’m pretty excited about historical reenactors at Fort Clatsop. Looking forward to getting my Lewis and Clark on this summer! Maybe I’ll start researching lighthouses too, otherwise known as the “how far up the narrow stairs will Amelia start whining that her legs are tired” game. 

We were going to do Tillicum instead of Beverly Beach near Newport, but realized just in time that it had no showers. For days 5 & 6 of camping on the coast, I think I require hot showers. We’ll see about the kids. 😉 We camped at a Beverly Beach when Baxter was quite little (just for one night), and we really liked how forested it was, so close to the beach.  Our campsite this year is right next to the playground, yay!

In Newport we plan to see the aquarium at least, and we may or may not see the Sea Lion Caves. My dad says it’s not worth it, but we’ll see. Maybe we’ll go super touristy, maybe we’ll stay on the sand every moment possible. Speaking of, should I get Tom a wetsuit?

Planning a family road trip

We’re planning to take a week off in August to take our first major family road trip. The kids are 3 & 6 now, and probably close to old enough to tolerate 3-4 hours in the car per day without driving us insane. We had toyed with the idea of going down to Yellowstone when we thought Tom’s dad would be coming with us, but since he’s elected to sit this one out, we’re thinking of just toodling around the state of Oregon.

One of my favorite places to visit in Oregon, other than the coast, is Crater Lake. However, I’m not sure the kids are old enough to get anything out of it. Since we’ll be traveling in August, I’m not wild about going to Bend, since it’s so high desert and I’m not a huge fan of deserts in the first place, much less hot ones.

But seriously: Crater freaking Lake!
But seriously: Crater freaking Lake!

So now we’re thinking we might just spend 4-5 days camping at the coast and then stay one night near a lake or river somewhere in the Willamette Valley area, on our way home.

Should we camp near Humbug Mountain?

I will say that I’ve done a night or two of research on the “family road trips with small kids in Oregon” topic, and the blogosphere is not rich with great data.  I may end up having to blog our adventures just because so few other people seem to be doing so, and as every parent of small kids knows when planning a trip, more data is better. I have a nifty new iPad to use for beta testing now, so there’s really no excuse left for me to do some travel blogging this summer. 🙂