Making Lemonade

Job-wise things are totally up in the air. Bill has already had a couple interviews, sent out a lot of messages to contacts, and is even working on a possible Navy option. We are basically assuming we'll be leaving the area because none of the current options are local. We'd love to stay, but more options seem to be elsewhere. So we're trying to make some lemonade out of lemons and do as many things as we can here before we leave. On Saturday we went down to the actual coast, 2.5 hours away, and had a fun beach day despite some pretty crazy cold and windy conditions. Yesterday we went to Snoqualmie Falls. We're going to do as much stuff as we can here so we don't feel like we squandered the last 18 months. In actuality, Bill and I have been incredibly busy with work and school and life and it's been hard to do a ton of adventuring, but we'll do our best to make up for that in the coming weeks.

Genevieve made some cute Harry Potter stick puppets.

Last day of school! Here's a comparison of first and last days. I'm so happy for summer to finally be here. It comes so late in Washington, and so I always appreciate it more.

 Twin Harbors State Park. There was a 30-40 mph sustained wind the whole time we were on the beach, and it rained the whole time. Our kids alternately had a ball and froze their pants off and were sad, but overall it was great.

 Chloe the pirate.

 Geneveive too.

 New wok for Father's Day.  Happy day to our favorite dad!

 A quick afternoon trip to Snoqualmie Falls. I'd not been, although Bill took the kids last year.

When your life changes direction

Tuesday morning dawned bright and early like any other day but a few hours later our world turned upside down when Bill got an unexpected call telling him he had been laid off, starting immediately. Man, that is a shocking feeling. We have really settled into the idea that we are going to settle here in the PNW, and now everything has changed. We've hit the ground running, brushing up resume, reaching out to contacts, sending in resumes. I almost haven't had time to think about it, but every once in a while I get a calm moment and the thoughts descend and it's hard.

It's hard to have your world turned on its ear. It's hard to not know where you're going to live in two weeks or two months, where your kids are going to go to school. It's hard to be looking around for a new place to work and a new area to settle in because there aren't a lot of ready options here, so we expect we'll have to move. We made this our dream and it feels like it got ripped out of our hands when just 18 months ago everything fell perfectly into place to get us here.

Something will work out. Bill has a strong resume. People are looking at it and interested. We just have this feeling of homelessness again. We had chosen to make this home and it feels like a rejection in a way. I wonder where the new home will be. I hope we figure it out fast. Heck, maybe it will still be here. Who knows. This job hunt is young.

I cut Aaron's hair this weekend for the first time since quarantining in March. He looks good!

Chloe is so funny. She gets a kick out of the oddest things, but her laugh is infectious. 

Aaron got hit with a very random stomach bug on Sunday. He woke up throwing up and threw up so many times until he took a nap in the afternoon and it's like it never happened. He ate everything in sight and has been fine since.

I've run out of projects and hobbies and so I finally picked a new quilt pattern with the help of my mother-in-law this weekend. I'm making two quilts. One for me, one for Bill. In the summer our duvet gets too hot and we usually switch to a single quilt each. But we don't have matching ones. So I'm making on in turquoise and white for me and one in dark purple and white for Bill. Those are our current favorite colors. I haven't decided yet what pattern I will put the squares in. This was just a test square, but maybe it'll get put into the quilt. We'll see.

We spent the weekend at our cousin's house and they have the best climbing tree. We had nerf gun battles and played outside and it was so nice to hang out with family. We haven't spent time with much of anyone since March, so it's such a treat to be together. And now, since we may be moving, it seems like I want to hang out way more because oh my gosh, how did we not take enough advantage the last 18 months??

A stay at home sort of week

We did very little this week, just went on a hike on Friday. Otherwise we stayed home and followed the news most of the week. I don't feel like I'm in a place where I can easily go to the protests, but I support their aims. It's really intense watching things unfold, even supporting from the sidelines. We're still in school as well. This is the last week of instruction. It can't go by fast enough. This summer is going to be weird in a lot of ways. Hopefully there will be plenty of good to go along with all the different and hard.

I finished reading Harry Potter book two to the two littles yesterday. We've already started book three. They love it. They stayed with me for two plus hours yesterday playing legos while I read. I love how much they're pulled in. 

From our hike, here's a few shots. I bought a new pair of chacos. They're comfy as can be. 

 This is the best I got when I asked for a quick shot of all of them. The rest of them Chloe was turned around backwards in protest. Haha!

 I introduced them to salmon berries. The girls loved them, especially Chloe. They're pretty tasty.

 We have tons of extra milk from school lunches, so I took a page out of my sister-in-law's book and made chocolate pudding. It's tasty! And I have so much of it. I doubt we'll get through it, but that's okay. It was fun to make.

 New clothes from Grandma.

 The boys are letting their hair grow indefinitely. Aaron the Hobbit is pretty stinking cute.

 Genevieve made a Minecraft bee. Pretty creative. I've taken to leaving our legos out on the living room floor and the kids have played with them constantly. I push them back into a semblance of a pile pretty regularly, but otherwise let them play away with them and I love all their creativity.

What a week

Wow, this was a hard week in our country. Coronavirus still chugging along. The death of George Floyd, leading to protests, many of which have turned violent. I read something this week that resonated. It's not time anymore to be quietly non-racist. We need to be loudy anti-racist. I think that's so true. The experience of Black Americans in the United States is so different than for me, a white female. I have a tiny inkling of some issues being female and not always feeling safe, but that in no way compares. I don't have eloquent words to explain how I feel, but racism is wrong, and it's high time we make better progress to root it out.

In my own little quarantine world, things this week were calm. I took update pictures of my garden. I made a new mask, which after I washed it is now a bit snug, so remember that. Pre-wash if it's one of the tighter fitting styles. My kids played lots of Minecraft, did school, and we actually got to go to a little lake near us with our cousins. It was a good week.

Aaron wore this headband all day one day. It mad eme chuckle.

 I made this cute new mask but didn't wash the fabric and now it's kind of small. Whoops!

 Setup our AC unit for summer in our kitchen. The next day it got cold again. But we're ready now! No more 90 degree afternoons in my kitchen.

 Chloe got really excited to draw in this learn to write book. I had thought she might be a lefty like Spencer because she's been very ambidextrous her whole life, but looks like she's settled on being a righty.

 Slugs are destroying my baby zucchinis and I have tiny cucumbers I want to live too. So this is the new solution and hopefully they can get past the state of being tiny and beat the slugs.

 Four sweet pepper plants are doing great and this is a second batch of sugar snap peas after I planted some in a big planter with a hosta because I thought they'd grow faster than it, but I was wrong. The hosta filled right out and we'll see how the peas under it do. They're not dead and they're still growing, but we'll see if we get any peas.

 One tomato from the store and two tiny little things I'm growing from scratch.

 Carrots

 And if you look close, you can see the pea vine climbing up through the hosta.