My Birthday + Memorial Day

Last Thursday was my twenty-seventh birthday. Since Adam has extra vacation this year thank to paternity leave, he was able to take the day off. We opened presents first thing in the morning. No patiently waiting in this family! Adam surprised me with these beautiful jadeite serving bowls and helped the girls pick out a pretty lavender candle.

He also arranged for our generous friend Megan to watch the girls in the afternoon. We had lunch at Chick-fil-A and went on the Underground Tour. It's been on our list since moving to Seattle almost four years ago, but we never think of going on a date during the day. It's a hilarious and fascinating look into the city's history - here we are standing in an old hotel lobby actually under the sidewalks of Pioneer Square.

Adam made a delicious dinner of flank steak, broccoli, baked potatoes, and chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting for dessert. It was a really nice day and I feel like the festivities aren't even over yet because I'm getting away for a haircut/pedicure this weekend and we have a date night planned for the following weekend.

On Friday, we packed everyone up and drove across the state to visit my parents for the long weekend. We relaxed at their beautiful new house, flew kites in the backyard, enjoyed delicious meals fresh off the grill, played cards, got iced coffee and frozen hot chocolate from Dutch Brothers, and let the kids go crazy picking out coloring books and stickers at Dollar Tree since we don't have one around here.



On Saturday, we rode an antique carousel.

Well, antique except for the addition of the WSU and UW mascots!

The carousel is right next to a splash park, where Claire jumped right in, Maggie stood nervously watching from the sidelines, and Betsy hung out with Grandma.

On Sunday, we went to a playground on the banks of the Columbia River.







Trying valiantly to keep my eyes open for the camera and wishing I hadn't left my sunglasses in the car!

Then went to a 4:00 pm Latin Mass. There's a Latin Mass parish in Seattle that we've really wanted to visit, but they have High Mass at 11:45 am and that's always sounded like a difficult time to take toddlers somewhere new. So when we heard that my parents' parish had a late afternoon option every other week, we jumped at the chance to check it out.

Unfortunately, the very old priest talked so quietly and mumbled so much that we couldn't really hear or understand anything. He's retired and it's very kind of him to travel into town to do this, but we will not be rushing back to this particular service. Nothing against Latin Mass in general though - we'd still like to check out the parish near us at some point.



We're looking forward to visiting them again for July 4th!