TRIP TO SEATTLE

Gee, is the computer on CAPS LOCK again? Einar likes to push that button on the keyboard all of the time. What I really like is when he's pushing the button while I'm typing and then he shoves the keyboard back into the desk with my hands still on it.

Thankfully, Einar is becoming very helpful in other ways as well. He puts his dirty clothes in the hamper, is getting pretty quick when cleaning up his toys, carries my tea out to the car in the morning if we are going to the park, pushes the buttons on the blender to blend our smoothies, and today he even "helped" me to bake a chocolate cake.

Last week we returned from a great trip to Seattle to see the whole family. We celebrated Jared's birthday on the first night we were there at Soup Night at Tor and Jess'. Other big family events were the wedding of Kendall and Brian (Kendall is Jared's cousin) and the baby shower for Dominic (the son of David and Anna [David is another cousin of Jared]). We also took a bus ride downtown to see trains and have dim sum lunch with Poppa, Mary, and Sammy. One highlight of the trip downtown for me was a new store that is in Westlake Center called Daiso that is a Japanese $1.50 store that had the greatest variety of Japanese stuff that I've seen in a long time! One day we went to Bothell to feed Sherm and Mary's chickens and Sherm even let Einar drive his new tractor around the yard. Einar is still talking about both the tractor and the bus ride. Einar also got to go to the Woodland Park Zoo with Poppa and FarMor one morning and I hear that he ate a lot of hummus at lunch. Not only does he like hummus now, but we also brought back a carnivore from Seattle. We've caught him eating combo pizza, meatballs, and turkey sandwiches this week.

We had a great visit, but realize that since we have so much family and so many friends in the area that we really need more than a week to spend in Seattle! Next time we might even plan a few rest days in the trip to give both the little guy and the grandparents a break. My apologies to those people that we didn't have a chance to see on our trip. No doubt we'll be back!

This week we've just been working on getting back to normal a bit. It's back to cooking three meals a day for me and playgrounds and sunscreen for Einar. Jared's been hard at work, but is off for the weekend.

Tomorrow I do have a bit of an adventure planned for me. I'm going to go with a church group to Tecate, Mexico to visit and work in a boys' orphanage for the day. I've not been to any of the border towns yet and it should be a very eye-opening day for me. We leave at 7:30 tomorrow, so I should probably get to bed soon and rest up.

Easter Weekend Adventures

Hey everyone! We had a great Easter weekend with several egg hunts, a nice dinner on Sunday with friends, and since Jared had Monday off, we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park together.

Tomorrow we are going to Seattle to visit the families! It's pretty late at night right now and I'm not quite done packing, so this is a short entry. It helps that the pictures speak for themselves.

Life in Rural San Clemente

Who knew that we lived in rural San Clemente? Yes we can walk to Starbucks, Trader Joe's and the movie theater in less than 5 minutes, but we also have ourselves some livestock to feed and a tiny loquat orchard (ok, so it's only one tree) in our yard.
I finally remembered to bring the camera when we visited the sheep, the donkey and the pony the other day so that you can all see what I'm talking about. The animals got lots of great carrot and radish tops this week from our basket. Einar loves visiting the animals, but won't take part in the actual feeding. That's fine by me since I like the feeding part a lot.

A week or so ago I saw lots of yellow fruit on the tree in our yard. I've never seen fruit like that before, but I asked a friend of mine who has live in Southern California forever and also has a horticulture background and she said without a thought that the tree was a loquat tree. After some online research I found out that they are edible and related to apples and peaches. We don't see them in the grocery stores because they are so fragile. The world's largest producer of loquats is the Japanese (I didn't see any while I was there) and they can also be found in the warmer climates of North America. I harvested ours tonight and added them to the salad as well as made a strawberry-loquat sauce for our pork tenderloin. They are quite good, but require a lot of effort. I might make a small batch of jam with the rest of them or maybe just eat them for breakfast.