Parentals

Over the past few months we had visits from both of our parents! Looks like they didn't forget about us all the way up here in Washington. They did happen to remember our existence when our weather is nice and theirs is nasty... how convenient :)

My parents came over Memorial Day weekend. Their favorite part of the trip was seeing all of the beautiful scenery and seeing how ridiculously priced houses are in our area (Seattle was all like, "housing crisis? whatever!").

We went and visited Forks (the home of Twilight) and my mom was oh so excited! The city of Forks welcomed us - all of the residents were anticipating our arrival and setting up souvenir shops so we would spend our money. Luckily for them, my mom had promised a number of female co-workers some Twilight gear. I also had a very tasty philly cheese steak sandwich. Thank you City of Forks.

Henry was pretty ecstatic about this whole Forks thing, obviously.

The obligatory Twilight paraphernalia was everywhere. I don't think Forks had much going for it before Stephanie Meyer. She should have an elementary school named after her or something.

My best Bella impression. All you have to do is look disinterested and then speak in short, forced, awkward sentences.

We also went and explored some of the scenery around the Olympic peninsula. My dad got some really good action shots of Henry pushing me off of this log right after he took this one.

We were lucky enough to have some beautiful sunny days and my parents came away disappointed that they didn't get rained on (silly Arizonians).
Here I am telling my mom, "Those are buildings, that tall one is actually a space ship."

Henry's parents came in for the 4th of July weekend, and it turns out I didn't take many pictures while they were here! Their favorite part of the trip was taking a bus into Seattle (Senior disounts!) and eating fresh salmon and Dungeness crab.

We went on hikes, explored the city, and had a great time! It's nice to not have to cram everything in because we know they'll be back again.

Summertime?

Hello everyone! Here are some things we've been up to lately. We haven't done too many "summer" things yet because the weather has been too cold! But we will hopefully be doing more and not blogging about it... like usual. I mean, we will faithfully report on our lives every week and bore you to death with posts about meetings, work drama, primary children, and our latest TV show on Netflix! How exciting!

Last weekend I got it in my head that I wanted to get some worms and start a worm bin as a way to compost our organic waste. I was pretty excited (and still am) and I think of it as a kind of science project. Here is the worm bin and the worms that arrived in the mail on Thursday:

(Don't mind my awkwardly held hands... they were dirty from wetting newspaper so of course I had to hold them like that.)

They are now busy eating away at our trash (including compostable Microsoft cups!) and making us some good soil. I just hope they live.... Henry thinks we don't eat enough vegetables to keep them alive :(

We also had a Reese's taste test with some friends of ours, Elena and Aaron. They bought a bunch of different Reese's products and we rated them based on texture, chocolate quality, PB quality, chocolate/PB ratio, and then gave each an overall rating. The results: everything pretty much sucks except the original Reese's and the minis. Reese's should stop branching out and trying to make versions of everything else! Just stick to what you're good at, sillies.

Prodigious amounts of milk were also consumed.
Here is Aaron dutifully entering in our ratings (on a scale of 1 to 10) into a spreadsheet to tabulate the results. Yeah, we're cool like that.

Another fun thing we did was shoot some guns! This was my first time shooting a gun and it was kinda fun, but we won't be purchasing our own any time soon.
Here's Henry shooting some gun.

Sandra and I both thought is was very loud! Even with earplugs. This is also me rocking the double-glasses look. I like to call it "six-eyes".

Here is me shooting some gun. I hit the target and that's what matters.

Gator hunting

While in Florida we really wanted to see some gators, so we headed out to the nearby wetlands (sanitation water re-usage zone) to get up close and personal with the Florida native. We saw a total of 16 gators (tallied by a professional gator-hunter, our 10-year-old nephew) and even spooked a huge one which made a scary splash back underwater.

It was love-bug mating season... so this was the state of the minivan after our 20-min. drive. Lovely.

Just a little warning not to go traipsing around shallow waters. This is the real thing baby! No fences for us! And we did not harass the alligators, unless you count staring and yelling, "gator! gator!"

It was a beautiful, bright, sunny Florida day. Here are our 3 Tappen nephews.
And our beautiful Tappen niece. She's the princess of the family, as evidenced by her elevated position.

And last but not least, the footage! They didn't move around too much because of the heat, so this was the only one I caught on tape.

Later in the week, we had the opportunity to EAT some gator in the form of a gatorburger. And not to be trite, but it really does taste like chicken.

Henry Potter's wand

Just back from our trip to Florida. Here's a little peak at what we did:

Ollivander himself chose Henry to receive a wand (for only $29.95!) and Henry hammed it up for the crowd.

More pics to come!