Haven’t been taking too many photos lately, but here’s a few to let you all know what we’ve been up to. I guess I haven’t been through the pictures in a while, because some of these are from several weeks ago.
We’ve been camping a couple more times recently…this photo is from a trip we took with Dawn and Doyle and Kadin to Silver Falls State Park. We finally got Milo his own camp chair and he loves it.
Sitting around our little campfire.
Next morning we fit in a short hike to see one of the falls the park is named for. you can see the trail we took down below that goes back behind the waterfall.
Anna and Kadin took some pit stops to explore some little caves along the way.
Anna and I on the hike.
Two weekends ago (or was it three?) we participated in a really great event called the sunday parkways. Apparently they’ve put several of these on throughout the summer in various neighborhoods, but this was the one for SE Portland. The city closed off a huge 13-mile loop of streets to all vehicle traffic and everyone came out with bikes and wagons and strollers and unicycles to ride around. There were events going on in several of the city parks along the loop, so you could stop and get some food or play in the park etc. It also coincided with the Hawthorne street fair, so it was quite an event. We met up with a group of friends and spent most of the day riding around and hanging out in the parks.
Aside from the fact that you could tell it seriously impacted traffic flows where the loop crossed the main thoroughfares, it still seemed like it flowed pretty smoothly. There were an army of volunteers manning intersections, and I saw no fewer than 30 police officers controlling traffic, so I’m sure it wasn’t cheap or easy to pull off, but it sure was nice to see so many bikes out and about.
The kids had lots of fun (Anna sustained a hula hooping injury), and fell asleep right at the end of the ride.
We also had Grandpa and Grandma Newman in town a couple weekends ago and had a very nice visit. Anna of course always loves to have any visitors, but especially grandparents, so she kept both Grandpa and Grandma pretty busy most of the trip. Milo was also pretty excited to have them around to show off for.
We didn’t have the camera out much while they were in town apparently, but one thing we did get some photos of while they were in town was the 13th annual portland adult soapbox derby. I’ve been hearing about this event for years, but have never actually made it out to see it…so we figured we had to try and make it out this year. Similar to the sunday parkways event, it seemed like half of portland (the crazy half) turned out.
The rules for the soapbox derby are that the car has to cost less than $300 to make, be entirely gravity powered, and must have brakes of some sort…there’s probably some other rules, but that’s the bulk of it. People get pretty creative with their cars. Some are built for speed, some go more for style. Wish we had gotten more photos, but there are a ton of them around the internet for anyone curious. This Lego car was pretty sweet.
This ratmobile (at least we think it was a rat) was one of our favorites.
The flintstone car looked pretty neat…I don’t think it did too well it the timed trials though.
We talked about entering a car next year…we’ll see if anything materializes on that…
One last set of photos from this past weekend. I took Anna on her first fishing trip. She was pretty excited about it.
We went out on Saturday morning to Oxbow Park on the Sandy River. Anna insisted that we stay and fish for the whole day. I had called a fisherman friend to see where I might stand a chance of catching something. The Sandy was kind of a longshot he said, not much running in there yet but if we got anything it’d probably end up being something like a bigger steelhead or an early coho just starting up river. Still it seemed like a nice place to spend the day, so we stopped and got a few spinners and set out for the river. We got a nice spot on the beach and ended up having it pretty much to ourselves all day. I didn’t really want to put a hook on Anna’s line just yet, so I put some sinkers on the end and a bobber and then I’d cast and let her reel it in. We put a spinner on my rod and fished the heck out of that one spot where we sat all day. Probably not very good technique, but we did have fun. Not so much as a bite (we did catch a leaf though).
We took a lot of breaks, played on some the play equipment there at the park. Had a nice picnic lunch. Took a short hike. Sat by the river and told some stories. Waded in the river a bit. Saw a few inner tubes and kayaks going down river but that was about it. It was a pretty nice quiet day by the river.
That’s about all the photos we’ve got for now. This Labor Day weekend was pretty rainy and we didn’t do too much. Anna is excited to start back up at her preschool tomorrow. We’ve been doing a lot of food preservation canning, freezing, pickling etc. Milo is really starting to walk everywhere now and is getting into everything. Will post some more photos soon. In the meantime, here’s a funny video of Anna spinning Milo around in one of our kitchen stools. I don’t know the story behind this video at all but I thought it was pretty funny.