I'd like some legos and a gun to go with that!

We love living here in Spokane. We've heard many people refer to Spokane as being the "biggest small town" around. It is, however, that small town feel that sometimes strikes us big city kids as a bit peculiar.

Yesterday we went to look for a present for Kellan's birthday next week. We went to one of the bigger hobby stores in town that we heard has great prices on toys. This 'hole in the wall' store did in fact have some good deals but shopping at the store wasn't exactly like a trip to Target or ToysRUs.

What surprised this city girl is that you enter the store through the gun department which smack dab in the front of the store. I guess I can see how the store doesn't want to drag serious hunters through aisles of toys, however, it was kind of weird walking into the store to be greeted by a wall lined with boxes of bullets in our pursuit of Thomas the Train.

Maybe that is typical of most hobby shops and I just don't know it since I usually buy most everything at Target. Sometimes though it is things like that that leave me feeling like a foreigner even around here!

What happens when you blink

We opened our dishwasher the other day to find this:



You may be thinking, "What in the world is that??"

Which is exactly what we were thinking.

We couldn't figure out what would cause such a horrible mess until we found....

the wrapper of one of those gigantic little kids crayons (you know that kind that are 3 times the size of a regular crayon?).

Yeah, fun.

Let just say that it took a lot of work to get that out of the dishwasher.

I guess when you have little kids around, crayons in the dishwasher is the kind of thing that can happen when you take the time to blink!

Kailee saves the day

Jason needed to build some hours in the Cessna 206 that he will be instructing in once the semester starts at Moody, so the family got to go along on one of his flights.

Mirielle was so excited about going flying that she was up first thing in the morning ready to go. We packed up all of our stuff and headed out to the airport. Jason preflighted the airplane and we got Kellan and I strapped into the middle row of seats first.

Things were going really well until we tried strapping Mirielle into the front seat. She was not excited about sitting in the front up by all of the controls. My super cool and calm husband explained how she needed to sit up in front to balance out the plane and that Kellan was too little to sit up in front and how she was just right and could watch him fly, etc. etc. The pep talk didn't seem to help much as she still was convinced that she needed to sit next to mom.

Since our first attempt didn't work so well, Jason took Mirielle back inside the building to get some seat cushions so that she could get a better view out the front window, thinking that might help calm her down. They came back talking about the pictures they saw in the office of the first mission aviation pilot, who happened to be a woman. We thought it would be a go until we tried strapping her in, which resulted in more tears.

On to idea 3. Next we tried putting her in the back row and pushing my seat back so that I was sitting in between her and Kellan. She wasn't too thrilled about that idea either....

So after more than 30 minutes of trying to convince her that she would be okay and have fun once we got in the air, we finally gave up. Defeated, we packed up and put the plane away. In between packing up and getting ready to leave, Jason discovered that one of his coworkers had brought his teenage daughter, Kailee, with him to work. She was more than happy to accompany us along on a flight and was able to sit in the back next to Mirielle. Kailee saves the day as you can see her presence made for all smiles in the back seats!

We enjoyed the ride around town and even got to see our house from the air. The scenery certainly was different than the last airplane ride we took into the tribe. Fields instead of coral reefs! We were so thankful that it turned out to be another fun family adventure (and we discovered a new babysitter that lives close to our house!).

A Perfect Day

We went exploring this weekend. A neighbor had told us about a farm area just outside of town that sold pick your own fruit so we decided to go check it out. It ended up being the PERFECT day! The weather here is still beautiful and with a breeze and clouds rolling through the bright blue sky, it was the perfect temperature to be outside for the day. It was a beautiful drive through the country up onto a bluff to the fruit farms.

Strawberries are in season now, so we picked our way through the fields until we were covered in red and our stomachs and our basket were full of delicious strawberries. It was a fun family activity for all four of us. The best part was that we had all of that fun for 95 cents a pound!

After strawberry picking, we still had some room in our stomachs for a little lunch. We drove our way around the bluff to another farm that had a restaurant. We had hamburgers and Jason and I enjoyed a piece of pie and a cup of coffee while the kids were busy working on their giant suckers. FUN!

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