Oreclipse 2017

So some of you may have heard, there was an eclipse here last week! Apparently, people were really stoked about it and came from all over the country to see it here. Fortunately for us, some of those swarms of people happened to be some of my favorite people on the planet including Katie, my parents and Natachia! I had just planned on working that day and stepping outside for a minute when it was actually happening to see it, but the district offices were closed on Monday due to fears of horrible traffic! So Eric and I both worked from home that day. My parents and sister had driven south to be in the zone of totality so I just walked Levi over to a park near our house and watched the eclipse from there while he ran around completely oblivious to the fact that an awesome astronomical event was unfolding right before us. Here in Tualatin the sun was like 98% eclipsed and I was super surprised how light it stayed the whole time! It was way lighter outside than I had expected with only 2% of the sun visible! And it was actually really eery. The birds stopped chirping, the insects came out and the whole earth was bathed in this super golden light. It was almost like looking at the world as a sepia tinted photograph. Very weird. And there were little crescent shadows all over the ground under the trees. It was definitely a unique experience but I wouldn't say that I got at all emotional about it. I have heard some people talking about what a spiritual experience it was for them to see the eclipse and I don't know if it's just because I wasn't in the zone of totality and didn't see the corona or what but I didn't have anything like that. Still, it was cool.

Anyway, as I said, my family came up here for the eclipse so our house was pretty full last weekend! My parents stayed with us the first two nights before they could check into their AirBnb and Katie, her two friends and Natachia stayed at Katie's new apartment. I am soooo excited for her to move up here officially in just a couple weeks! But yeah, I am definitely not used to feeding 10 people at a time! We blew through our food so fast! Haha. But it was so fun to all be together, although we were definitely missing Eric. We went peach picking on Saturday and got some delicious peaches which Katie's friends used some of to make some AMAZING peach cupcakes. I love how Oregon has so many u-pick farms close by. The produce is just so much better when you get to pick it at the peak of ripeness! And I love being able to support local farms.

Anyway, the eclipse and family visiting is the big news around here. But I also started my new job last week! It has been good so far! I really like my co-workers. Lori is the OT I'll be working with and Ha is the other PT who I am job sharing with and so far we get along really well. I think they'll be a great team. I've finally made it through reviewing all of my student's charts and IEPs and I spent a good deal of time of Friday tracking down equipment so this next week I will get to dive into actually starting some training and meeting some of my more involved kiddos. Then school starts the week after next!

Friday was Emily's last day. It was weird saying goodbye to her. I think it's still a little surreal to me, like I expect to just see her and Arlo again tomorrow. Arlo and Levi have gotten so cute together, I wonder if they'll miss each other. Levi doesn't start day care till next week though so we have our back-up nanny, Sonja, covering for us this week. I'm nervous for Levi to start daycare. I'm worried about how his first day will go, how it will affect his nap schedule (which is so great right now, he sleeps 2 1/5 to 3 hours in the pm, I love it!), and how it will affect his behavior in the evenings on Wed and Thurs. I'm worried that daycare will just totally wear him out so he will be a total grouch when he's home with us those evenings. But I think it will be a beneficial switch for our family overall. We'll be saving a lot of money and Eric will get to come home earlier in the evenings which is a huge bonus.

Another thing that happened recently was some weird health stuff. First, Levi came down with a funky rash all over his body! It looked awful but did not appear to itch or bother him at all and he had literally no other symptoms! But it moved around! It would be on his legs and back and then move to his arms and belly. It was super weird but then within 24 hours it was gone.

Then yesterday, I came down with a horrible UTI. I had never had one before and this one was like baptism by fire. And it came on when we were at the temple, right at the start of the session! And guess who was the witness couple? Yep, this girl and her man. So yeah, sitting through that session was literally one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was almost as distracting as being in labor! Sooo bad. So immediately after the session, Eric took me to urgent care. Only urgent care is not so urgent on Saturdays, there was a 2 and a half hour wait! So ridiculous! But thankfully they got me sent over to the lab sooner than that. I've never given a urine sample that looked like kool-ade before. There was so much blood. It was disgusting! But yeah, while I did that, Eric went and got me some Azo which took a whole hour to kick in, but after it did I felt so much better. And now I'm on antibiotics and feeling almost completely back to normal. Crazy.

So yeah, that's been our crazy life lately. I was realizing as I got the pictures for the last couple of weeks off of my phone, that we didn't get any pictures from the eclipse or from the family visit. Which is a bummer, but here are some other random pictures I did take!

Levi's curls on point. Love them so much!!

Eric and I took Levi to the OMSI again the other day and he loved it even more than last time! He had a wonderful time throwing the balls into the water tornado! 

Blackberries are in season right now and we have a ton of wild ones growing right around our house! Levi has loved eating them straight off the vine. When we go outside he points to the path where they are and asks for them with "ba?"

Levi just chilling and surveying his domain.

We went to this awesome icecream place with my parents in Portland on Thursday. They are all locally sourced and delicious. I had Oregon blackberry crumble in between two butterscotch cookies and it was amazing. 

Do you wanna blow a couple vacation days sleeping on the ground outside?

So, my super awesome parents gave us their old 4 person tent at the beginning of the summer and Eric and I finally had a chance to use it this past weekend! It was a beautiful but slightly disastrous experience. Haha. So first off, I started the trip feeling pretty stressed out because I took it upon myself to do all the things. I can be a little bit of an overachiever so for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to make three different types of overnight oats for us to eat Saturday morning as well as making pizza from scratch for dinner and packing up everything for the trip by myself all while trying to watch our super rambunctious little man in the 2 hours between when I got home from work and when we were planning on leaving for our trip. Yeah, I obviously need to take our apostles' advice a little more and SIMPLIFY my life. 

Anyway, once Eric got home from work we realized that the air mattress we were planning on taking (because I'm what Jim Gaffigan calls "indoorsy" and am much more into glamping than camping) did not have a foot or battery operated pump. So Eric called Fred Meyer and they assured him that they had both a battery operated pump as well as an adapter for the car to allow a regular AC plug to be plugged in. So we got everything loaded up and hit up Fred Meyer on the way to the campsite- oh and in all the hustle and bustle promptly forgot our new camping chairs that we had bought specifically for this weekend- facepalm! Anyway, once we got to the store we realized that the battery pump would not fit our air mattress so we elected for the (super expensive!) car adapter instead. 

We had expected Levi to sleep most of the drive up to the campsite because we didn't end up leaving until after 7 and it was an hour and a half drive. Alas, little man decided to show off his stubborn side and instead of sleeping thought it would be a good idea to scream, cry and whine intermittently throughout the whole drive. Needless to say, this did not help my stress levels. 

Once we got out to the area we wanted to camp in (Alder Glen) we found that we had arrived too late and all of the campsites were taken. I had a momentary freak out moment because it was starting to get dark and we needed to find a place and pitch our tent! Thankfully, I had seen a promising looking meadow near the road not far from Alder Glen. So we turned the car around and after a quick inspection revealed a fire pit already in place, set to work setting up our tent. Eric and I got it up quickly but then realized that the air mattress would not fit through the door once inflated so we would need to carry our tent close enough to the car that the cord for the mattress would fit out the door and into the car. This also necessitated moving our car to as close as possible to the clearing we were in. Upon doing so, I noticed a quite clear "no camping" sign displayed. Awesome. Well, it was quickly getting dark so we just threw caution to the wind and decided it was worth it to risk the fine. Yep, that's our version of living dangerously. 

Anway, the task then commenced of us awkwardly carrying our set up tent over the rocks and bushes in the gathering darkness till we could perch it near enough to the car for the cord to reach. Meanwhile, Levi had decided he had definitely had enough of this whole being in the car thing and was crying, "mama! dada! mama! dada!" repeatedly. I think it was around this point where I told Eric that I hated camping. Haha. Once, plugged in the air mattress started to inflate for about 3 seconds and then quit. We tried again. Nothing. We tried again. Again nothing. We turned the car off and on. Nothing. It was not going to work. So then I, the glamper, had to face the prospect of sleeping on the ground with literally no padding. Again awesome. But it was late, little man desperately needed to go to bed, and I wasn't about to repack everything we had already dragged out into the clearing and make the 1.5 hour drive home. So we precariously carried our tent back out into the clearing and made a bed inside with as many of the blankets underneath us as possible without freezing with nothing on top of us. I then got bubba ready for bed, and while I was in the middle of that, our lantern suddenly and spontaneously broke. Like the light didn't just go off, but like pieces literally fell off the lantern! Haha. At this point, I started really wanting to bust out some strong curse words and wondered if there was some force that really did not want us to camp this weekend. It occurred to me briefly that I was acting exactly like Laman and Lemuel and murmuring a lot and that doing so was not helping the situation any. This helped me kind of buck up and look on the bright side, at least a little :). 

So yeah, to make a long story short, Levi did end up going to sleep fine (after somewhat lengthy persuading) and sleeping through the night and Eric and I did get to build a beautiful campfire and make some perfect s'mores. We couldn't see the stars despite being in the perfect little clearing because of the cloud and smoke cover from the wildfires up in BC. But it was such a nice retreat from the extreme heat that we had been facing up here in Tualatin every day for the past week. And the air smelled so nice and fresh (well aside from our campfire smoke!). And I actually ended up sleeping better than I expected with so little padding between us and the ground. I woke up a lot and had to move around a ton because rocks but at least I didn't stay awake long. And in the morning it was so great to wake up together as a family out in our peaceful little clearing with the sound of the creek right nearby. 

Levi was thrilled to wake up right next to us. He was like "Dada? Dada!" with a huge smile on his face.

Eric likes to copy whatever Levi is doing when they take pictures. Love my cute boys!

Saturday was a much more relaxing and beautiful day than our crazy Friday night had been. We ate our delicious overnight oats, packed things up and then spent some time down by the creek just being together as a family and skipping (or in Levi's case) throwing rocks in the creek. It was so gorgeous and peaceful, and Levi loved being free to just explore outside. So after spending the morning exploring and hanging out by the creek, we decided to head home and let Levi nap in the car on the way. And this time, he actually did :)

Our perfect little clearing. So much more private than the campground would have been anyway! 

Levi is really into rocks.

Carrying around the broken, useless lantern. (thankfully Eric was able to return it and get a refund)

Levi had so much fun throwing rocks in the creek! Kept him entertained for a long time and he kept doing this little happy dance. Also isn't this one of the most lovely places ever!?!