Monday, August 22, 2016

First day {of the last year} of school

























We dearly hope this will be Jason's last year of school :)
Here he is as he tried to leave for class this morning ... in front of our house which is in an interesting state of repair/dis-repair.
He'd spent of 3 hours scraping peeling paint from the eaves this morning before he left (after spending nearly 10 hours doing the same thing over the weekend). What a fun way to start the school year!
Ahh ... the last month has been very, very full of mostly good things (birthdays, travel & visitors), but we are really worn out and surprisingly glad to have the school year beginning. Although I know it will wane, there is a certain level of excitement that comes with feeling close to the finish line.

Monday, August 1, 2016

Spokane Stay-cationing

Since the very first time Jason took me to Spokane, he's been a great area tour guide ... taking me to many wonderful parks, hikes, cafes/restaurants and other places of interest. We recently realized that in the past two years of living so close to Spokane we've rarely taken advantage of the fun stuff to do there and vowed we needed to have a tourist day there with Luke. So we did.

Our first stop -- Frank's Diner, a beautiful train car turned restaurant that serves an awesome breakfast.  Luke was especially thrilled with the scoop of butter that came on his pancakes (which he ate in one bite! Yummy!)











































Next stop was my favorite Rockwood Bakery on the South Hill for a fancy coffee ... would have loved to had a date there without kids, but ... I got to stand in line for 5 minutes on my own and just soak in the ambiance. Almost as good ;-)

Next South Hill stop, the beautiful Manito Park (Man - eh - toe ... I always want to pronounce it with a Spanish pronunciation which isn't right). A place for Luke to run and us to enjoy some of God's spectacular creation.




























Next, armed with some take-out from Chicken-N-More, we met up with Jason's family at Riverfront Park where you can slide down a giant radio flyer wagon, "feed" trash to an iron goat and ride a 100 year old carousel.
































The whole Schlaf-clan together :












Luke getting some much enjoyed cousin/auntie/uncle time in --
























Lastly, although we had melting down kids in the car, Jason was kind enough to let me hop out at Trader Joe's and stock up on "necessities." All-in-all, a really perfect (& exhausting) day.