Fun in Oregon

We went to Oregon last week for my sister’s wedding (more on that later) and decided to make a vacation out of it and spent a week there. We helped with wedding prep part of the time, but we still had time to relax and do a few fun things. Unfortunately, the first couple of days were rainy, but then it warmed up and the weather was great.

Bennett had fun playing with his cousins and grandparents. Every time his grandpa went outside to do yardwork, Bennett was right there tagging along.  Most of the time he just followed him and talked to him, but he did attempt to help a few times. He also had fun finding “fred”, the frog who lives in my parents’ hose holder thing. Actually, this is not the real Fred but a smaller frog who has taken up residence in the hose reel.

  On Tuesday, Nate and I went to lunch downtown to a restaurant my sister & brother worked at in high school. Fortunately, it was warm enough that we could sit outside in the back by the creek and walked around for a little while afterwards. That night, my family watched the kids again so we could go to a play at the

Shakespeare festival. It had been a long time since I had been to one, and Nate hadn’t ever gone, so it was fun to experience what makes Ashland famous. The cheap tickets were sold out by the time we decided to go a couple weeks earlier, but we went to the box office about 45 min. before and were able to get nicer seats for 1/2 price since it was right before the show. It was pretty entertaining – neither of us knew the story line and there admittedly points where we really didn’t know what they were talking about with the fancy Shakespeare language, but it was fun.

When the weather did warm up, we took advantage and took the kids to Garfield Park, where there are some fun water fountains. Bennett was the most adventurous and ran under the fountain that just dumped water on his head, which was pretty surprising – he is usually not the adventurous one. 

    

Three wet boys eating a snack 

It was a fun week – great to have a little vacation, built-in babysitters so Nate and I could have a little one-on-one time, lots of time with family, and cousins and new toys for Bennett to play with. I’ll do a separate post with all the wedding pics!

Laughing

Ryan has started laughing every once in a while - usually when he's being tickled. He must be pretty ticklish (tickleish?) because he does it sometimes when I'm just changing his clothes. I caught his laughing on video yesterday - you have to wait a little bit for him to get going but it's pretty cute!

Happy 4th of July!

We had a fun-filled somewhat busy 4th of July weekend. It was great to be able to spend time together and with family, and to celebrate Independence Day. We spent Friday evening and Saturday at a family reunion with Nate’s extended family. We were sleeping in not-too-rustic cabins, but I was worried how Ryan would do at night and that he would wake everyone else up (Nate’s whole family was in our cabin). He actually did great and slept through the night, but Bennett woke up at 4:40 and then woke up for the day at 5:45 and wouldn’t go back to sleep. We had fun just hanging out outside and eating plenty of soft-serve ice cream cones from the machine Nate’s uncle provided (Nate pretty much always had one in his hand). We also went down to the lake on Saturday and rode around on the paddle boats. We went down at 1:00 and Bennett lasted about 5 minutes before he was fast asleep on the boat.

My brother and his family were in town for his wife’s sister’s wedding, and they came to church with us on Sunday, so it was nice to have someone to sit with in Sacrament Meeting and to hang out with them for a little bit after. We went up to Nate’s parents’ house that afternoon and got to watch Heidi & Cory’s fireworks show before heading home.

fielding, batting (he did actually hit it a few times), and running for home in the baseball game at grandma & grandpa’s

Monday morning, we got up bright and early so we could go down to the “Freedom Festival” parade in Provo. We were surprised at the lack of traffic on the freeway heading down there. Despite arriving just 1/2 hour before the parade started, Nate found us a pretty big spot with a decent view. Definitely not front row, but we could see and were able to save spots for my brother’s family and in-laws. The parade was pretty good – Bennett especially loved the old-school orange tractors and the giant inflated Scooby-Doo. The parade was a little shorter than I expected, which was nice because the cloud cover that kept things cool at first had burned off and it was getting pretty toasty.

Bennett demonstrating his beauty queen wave, and Ryan was pretty excited to hold the flag – he wouldn’t let it go.

Monday night, we went up to Bountiful and hung out with some friends, then watched all the now-legal fireworks from their house up on the side of the mountain. We originally thought Bountiful City was going to do fireworks, but they are just doing them on the 24th. We still had a pretty good show though. It was a fun end to a great weekend!