A Month of Gratitude, Days 5 & 6

Day 5
I live in Portland, so I'm no stranger to rain.  But we had a dry summer and an absolutely gorgeous beginning to fall.  And now it's raining, which I find depressing.  But today, I've decided to be thankful for rain, because without the cold rainy days I wouldn't be able to enjoy the beautiful sunny days as much.

Day 6
We've lived in the same house for eight years - the longest I've lived anywhere since I was 13.  Over the years we've made connections and grown friendships with people in our neighborhood, a group of people who I have come to think of as my village.  I blogged about them two and a half years ago, and I still love them all just as much now, possibly more.  Tonight each of the girls had somewhere different to be, all at the same time, and I relied on friends to help make sure everyone was where they needed to be when they needed to be there.  I love being a part of this village, and I'm so thankful I have them.

What are you thankful for today?

Living in The Village

I hate my house.  HATE it.

Well, okay, maybe that's a little harsh.

I really don't like my house.

It's too small.  The builder did a shoddy job.  The wiring is faulty.  The carpet is cheap and badly in need of a cleaning.  There is no pantry.  It's too small.  The original paint (still in a few upstairs rooms) was hideous.  There is nowhere for visitors to park.  The people renting across the street like to swear at each other, with the windows open, at 2am.  Did I mention it's too small?

Okay, fine, I hate my house.

But I refuse to move if it means leaving this neighborhood.

We moved here almost sight unseen.  In fact, the first time I laid eyes on the house, or the neighborhood, was the day we pulled up with the moving van and a front door key.  Chris flew up and spent a day with a realtor, looking at houses and taking pictures, which he then shared with me.  After a lot of thought and prayer, we settled on a place and made an offer.

We've lived here six years now.  In June, Vicki "graduated" out of the same school she started attending in kindergarten.  There is a core group of families that we've met since that day in 2005 that I consider to be as good as family; people I love to spend time with, and who I trust with my children (and who I'm fairly certain trust me with theirs.)  I cannot imagine my life without these families as a part of it.

You've heard the phrase, "It takes a village to raise a child"?  Time and again since moving away from our "real" family, I have seen this in action.  These families have banded together to help look out for each other.  They have been my salvation on a number of occasions.  I've seen rides offered so that someone else's child doesn't have to miss out on a book club meeting.  I've seen watchful eyes kept on other's people's children on the school playground - I know that if something were to happen to me and I wasn't able to make it to the school on time to pick up my kids, several other parents would have my back.  I've seen countless impromptu playdates, arranged on the spur-of-the-moment with a "what's one more?" attitude.  I've seen parents willing (and even - dare I say it - excited) to look after my children on short notice when I've needed it most.

Maybe it's like this everywhere.  I don't know - I guess I never needed it before.  But I do know that we have our own amazing little Village here (might I just add that it's due in no small part to our wonderful neighborhood school), and I don't ever want to have to find a new one.



Village children and their gingerbread houses, Dec. 2010


I may hate my house, but I love my home, here in my Village.

There's an App for That?

I have an iPhone, but Chris got an Android-based phone (I guess it's only fitting, since I was raised Mac, while he's been a PC for life).  We're constantly comparing apps, but it's always nice to compare with someone who has the same OS.  Last Friday we went to the park with friends, and while the kids played, Chris and Tod talked phones.

"You definitely need this one!"

Tod's had his phone for longer, so he was telling Chris about all the must-have apps.  If you ask me, everything they discussed falls into two distinct categories: useful apps, and turn-you-into-a little-boys-again apps.

Case in point: Jedi Lightsaber:

Useful?  Not at all.

A must-have?  Obviously.

You Should Move to Portland

The main reason we chose Portland when Chris was looking for jobs is its close proximity to EVERYTHING.

Not only is it a big city, but it's just two hours from both the ocean and the mountains.  Today I want to sell you on the mountains.

Some of our best family friends invited us to join them in a President's Day snow hike around Trillium Lake.  Given the choice between spending a day on Mt. Hood and spending a day folding laundry, I had no problem choosing Mt. Hood.

If you move to Portland, neither will you.

You could go on a snow hike around Trillium Lake, and enjoy scenery that is breathtaking in all seasons.

Mt. Hood is back there, but it's too cloudy to see.



You'd probably have to stop a few times for snacks. (Girl Scout cookies are excellent incentives when it comes to hiking up a steep, snow-covered hill.  Just FYI.)  Maybe you'd even find an igloo to eat them in.

You could have a snowball fight.

I think I have at least one snowball fight picture of these two from just
about every year that they've known each other - it's what they do.



Watch out, he's going to throw a 'nowball at you!

Or make snow angels.

If you move to Portland, and go on a snow hike, you'll discover lots of fun places to explore.

Look how deep the snow is!
Also, Ellie thinks she can fly.

Or to just roll around.

If you're under six, you'll probably get to ride some of the way.

This is the life.

And this is a good thing, because there's an awful lot of walking involved.  4.5 miles' worth, in fact.  Although if you're like us you may not discover this until the end of your hike.

The stick seemed to help when she was forced out of the sled.

You should definitely move to Portland, because if you did, you'd probably make wonderful friends, like these:

Johnny, Ellie, Anna, Lexi, Vicki, Daniel, and Noah (in the sled)

And if you moved to Portland, not only would you get to see a beautiful place like this in the winter:

But you'd be here to see that in the summer, it looks like this:

Yes, you should move to Portland.

The One-Upper

You know those people whose stories can always top yours? The people whose labor is always just a little longer and more painful than yours, or whose crazy relatives are always just a little crazier than yours?

Apparently they start young.

Yesterday Ellie decided to get a snack of cheese for herself and her friend. This involved slicing it with the extra-sharp slicer, the one that once caused me to lose a small piece of my thumb.

I was upstairs wasting time Christmas shopping online when I heard the scream. It was the kind of scream that tells me something is truly wrong, not the kind of scream that tells me someone’s sisters are "out to get them".

I found Ellie sobbing halfway up the stairs, cradling her left pinkie finger in the other hand, trying valiantly through her pain and fear to keep the blood from dripping onto the carpet. Her friend was behind her, full of concern.

I led her into the bathroom, where we rinsed off the blood so I could assess the damage (not too much, thankfully, despite all the blood). As Ellie hyperventilated at the sight of so much red washing down the drain, her friend calmly offered a few sympathetic words of comfort:

“It’s not so bad, Ellie. One time I had a paper cut, and it was so much worse than that.”

One Last Hurrah

Saturday we celebrated summer one last time in true Oregon style. Rain? Who cares!*

*We planned a similar adventure for Memorial Day but cancelled due to rain.  It ended up being 90 degrees that day.  So, hoping for a similar outcome, we went ahead with our plans this time.  The outcome was not similar.  We had fun anyway.

We spent the day at Trillium Lake near Mt. Hood with our good friends Tod and Donna and their three kids, who are conveniently close in age to our own kids.

Chris and Tod put up a shelter, which we mostly used to protect our stuff from the rain, since we chose the moment of the biggest rainfall to take our walk around the lake.

Ellie helped.

We love Trillium because there's plenty to keep the kids occupied all day long and the scenery is breathtaking.

Lexi and Anya found this great seesaw tree and spent a good part of the day bouncing up and down.

Vicki and Kate named trees on our walk around the lake.

This one is called Curly:

This all I saw of Ellie and Leif for pretty much the whole walk.

In fact, it’s almost the only picture I have with Leif in it. He was pretty busy the whole day.

I have more pictures of Ellie, though. Like this one:

She was wondering what might live in there. I think it’s rather fortunate for her that nothing does.

Lexi found a tree stump and declared herself Queen of the Forest.

And Vicki worked on figuring out what she can still do with one good arm.

She can still make cobbler.  Yum.

Unfortunately we had to cut our day a little short, due to the rain and cold (and broken arm), but clearly everyone had a good time.

And we still got to eat our S’mores, they were just prepared in a less conventional, but still very tasty, way.

Preach the Word, Sister

Turns out Ellie gets a lot more out of church than we realized.

In the car after church on Sunday, she announced that as soon as we got home she was going over to Mavis’s house. Mavis, which is not her real name but sounds good on my blog, is our next-door neighbor. She and her sister LaVern moved in right after we did, so Ellie’s known them all her life. We fondly refer to them as our cat-lady neighbors, not because they’re crazy like cat ladies (because they’re not) but simply because they do have a lot of cats.

However, we don’t normally just go visit them at random, so we knew something was up.

Apparently in Ellie’s class at church they talked about being missionaries. I can only guess that her wonderful teachers probably suggested that friends and neighbors would be the perfect starting place for these little budding missionaries, not even expecting anything beyond the word missionary to make it out the door (and thinking they’d be lucky to even get that.) But Ellie is a funny little duck. The things you’d really like her to remember are gone in a second, and anything you assume she’ll forget will probably be remembered for eternity.

And she was one determined little duck. Not wanting to crush her missionary hopes, but slightly fearful of causing awkwardness in our otherwise comfortable neighborly relationship, we tried to discourage her from running over straightaway. We said we’d discuss at dinner how our family could best be missionaries. We made other, less awkward suggestions.

We thought we'd redirected her fervor, but we were fools.

After dinner the girls went outside to enjoy the rare sunshine. Chris and I holed up with books in an unusually quiet house. We learned later that Ellie marched herself right up to Mavis and LaVern’s door, knocked, and when LaVern opened up, said, “Hi! Do you need any help learning more about the Gospel?”

LaVern said, thank you, no, she was just fine, but would Ellie like to pet the cat?

At some point I will have to go next door myself and explain, but I think no harm was done. Even so-called cat ladies have a sense of humor.

Frenaissance is the only word for it

Last week was The Great Pamela and Allison Frenaissance of 2009. We hope to make this more of a tradition than it has been. 5 years is a really long time.

We love to show off the beauty and uniqueness of our adopted hometown, so visitors make us really excited (hint, hint.) When people come to see us, there are a few places that we always try to take them. The Portland Saturday Market is one. I forgot my camera that day, so I missed out on the opportunity to get a shot of the person in the bunny suit holding a sign that said, "Need money for carrots". They were standing next to a guy in a gorilla suit who, apparently, needed money for bananas. Ah, I love Portland.

We also went to Powell's Books, which is the definitely the coolest, if not the biggest bookstore in the world. While Chris and John wandered among the gardening, religion, history, and political books, we girls set up camp in the children's book section. Pam and I read to each other's kids and wimped out on the opportunity to take a picture of Tiny Edward in front of the Twilight books. There are some things that you can get away with when you're over 30, but we didn't feel like that was one of them.

On Monday we headed up to Mt. St. Helen's, which I'm slightly ashamed to admit we hadn't visited before. When you can practically see it from your house, though, it just isn't a priority, I guess.

On the way we noticed a sign for the town of Kalama, Washington, and decided to make a slight detour, because Tiny E. was eager to relive some high school memories.

Recognize it? If you've seen the movie, you should. At least if you've seen it more than once.

We were spotted by a friendly volleyball player who offered to take us on a brief tour, which, apparently, she and her friends have been doing all summer long for people like us. So we saw the breezeway where Bella and Eric have a conversation on Bella's first day at Forks High, the grassy area where the picnic tables are set up, and the mural (painted specifically for the movie) past which Bella marches, followed closely by Edward, on their way into the green forest which does not actually exist behind the school, where Bella first says the word "vampire" out loud.

Yes, we are pathetic. But we weren't the oldest women stopping by for a tour, either.

On to the volcano.

Unfortunately, it was cloudy, so we didn't get a great view of the famous crater, but we did get some cute pictures anyway.


The middle of the whiter space near the top left in this next one is where the mountain was slightly visible. We thought at first that only the top was covered by clouds, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Pam and John didn't seem all that bothered by it, but, again, it's something I see at least once a week, so I was kind of hoping for more. Oh, well. An hour and a half isn't all that far to drive, so we'll go again soon and hopefully see it all. And they'll just have to come again. Oh, darn.

On Tuesday we celebrated Lexi's birthday by making the drive to one of our favorite places in Oregon: Multnomah Falls. We love the fact that we live within two hours of all this amazing stuff. You should all come see us.

Of course Tiny E came along, brooding as usual.


We enjoyed some ice cream and then drove to my personal favorite waterfall here in the Gorge (we love Multnomah, but you'll see in a minute why this one is better): Latourelle Falls.


The path here takes you alongside the stream flowing out of the falls and down to a bridge that crosses it, with a fabulous view of the entire waterfall. You're near enough to feel the spray.

But if you don't mind a small hike down some slippery rocks, you can get right up to the base of the falls. I mean right. up. This may very well be my favorite picture from the week, and possibly even the year. When they got back to me after this, Lexi said, "Mom, this is the best birthday ever!"

No trip to the Columbia River Gorge waterfalls is complete without a visit to the Vista House at Crown Point. From there you get breathtaking views of the Columbia River in both directions

And Vicki, who didn't want her picture taken.


We also went swimming, ate more ice cream, celebrated a birthday, went to The Grotto, and just hung out, visiting and catching up. Oh, and she gave me a guided tour of Facebook, so I managed to sneakily catch up on a few people from high school (shocking, some of it, when you haven't seen them for nearly 15 years.)

And, of course, we had to watch Twilight together, since I hadn't seen it with the commentary (I swear I am not this bad normally. Get two grown women in love with Edward Cullen together, though, and it's a sad, sad sight.)


It was great to be together again. Pam knew me and loved me back when I thought it looked good to tuck my t-shirt into my jeans and then pull it halfway back out again, and when I tried out for all those high school plays because I thought I could act, and when I wore big, black Doc Marten boots (although they did make me cooler) and listened to Garth Brooks for hours on end. We got each other through our senior year of high school, we were in each other's weddings (picture me as a bridesmaid 7 months pregnant - yes, she loves me that much) and have managed to stay in touch all this time, despite the thousands of miles between us. BFFs indeed.

Do you think this trip highlighted enough virtues of the Pacific Northwest that they'd consider moving out here? :)