Spring Break: Part 2

Every year around Miles birthday, we do a beach trip. It worked perfectly to do it during Spring Break this year. I had also caught glimpse from some local photographers on social media of a beautiful place near the beach called Drift Creek Falls and I knew we had to go explore there! And it sure did exceed all our expectations! There is a 1.25 mile hike to the falls and the suspension bridge. And all the reviews said it was super family friendly!

Sidenote: I had told Miles that I wanted to get some 5-year-old photos of him on this trip, so he then decided to do a million poses and ask me to take his picture, he also got super muddy so I may take more official photos later, however there are still a lot of posed Miles photos...

 Moving on, The hike was pretty family friendly. There were quite a few muddy spots which we expected, Edwin didn't want to hold our hand a lot of the time and there were some ledges but it all turned out okay.

More of Miles' posing ideas...

But the scenery was amazing!

 Synchronized running!

And more signs of Spring, I bet this trail looks quite a bit different in the late Spring/ Summer.

Charles on his throne.

King Miles

 Ham

And then all of a sudden, the scenery changed into this hanging moss forest, it was pretty magical!

And then we finally made it to the suspension bridge. Edwin even walked the whole way, super easy "hike." And I don't feel like my photos do this place justice. It really was amazing. The boys loved the bridge and were fascinated by the waterfall.

 Don't worry, the bridge was over land where Edwin is standing, Max is just always practicing acrobatic skills with the boys.

 

Before hiking back, we had some snacks.

This smile, it just cracks me up!

We decided to play on the bridge more before hiking back too!

The bridge did shake when we walked on it so Charlie confessed to being a little terrified!

 So the weather was exciting, it was sunny but also a little drizzly on and off. You probably can't tell, but it is raining in this photo (and there were rain drops on my lens) The rain looked majestic in the sun.

 I think you can keep going and get to the bottom of the waterfall, but we will have to do that another day, we wanted to leave enough time to play on the beach.

So we went back. Edwin had hiked through his nap so Max put him on his back and he fell asleep.

He always likes to be in front!

 So Many Ferns!

 We snacked on these sour apple leaves throughout the hike, the boys thought it was amazing, but I don't get why they will eat these and not spinach. They really aren't that different.

Learning a little something on camouflaging yourself from Mountain man Max!

Well, we made it back to the car and even though it was mostly uphill on the way back, there were no complaints from the boys. WIN!

Then we started our drive to the beach, and we were happy to finally see a rainbow.

We made it to Pacific City. There was a beautiful mixture of sunshine and rainclouds, yet we didn't get rained on at the beach at all! Another WIN!

 Dune races

 I'm an amateur sunset photography but the skies did not disappoint!

As the sun was setting, Max set up a fire so we could roast hot dogs and s'mores!

 We stayed until we ran out of wood and baseball cards to burn. But then, near us on the beach, a woman was practicing fire dancing, so we got to enjoy her show and I tried to photograph it the best I could without the needed photography gear.

After 10pm, we decided we should probably start driving home. SO that is what we did and the boys slept for most of the drive!
Now I write all this down so our boys can never say we didn't do anything fun. Also Max and I were discussing how it is so fun to see the excitement our boys exude for the tiniest things, like finding the perfect walking stick, jumping in a mud puddle, throwing rocks in a creek, eating sour apple leaves and so on. We know these are the good days we are supposed to savor so we really try to soak it in. Anyway, it was a good day!

Spring Break: Part 1

It rained about 70% of Spring Break but that didn't stop us from having some great family time. I'm gonna start this Spring Break post on the Saturday before break because all sorts of great things happened that day!

Elizabeth and I realized we could start a date day swap whenever they want to come have a date in Portland. And we could probably do it if we wanted to have a date in Eugene at some point too. But we wanted to start by doing temple dates. So we picked a Saturday and blocked out the day. Elizabeth came in the morning and dropped off the kids. We got to watch all four of them along with our three. Elizabeth got to have some temple time and all the cousins got to play together and they really do play together quite well. While she was gone we had a scripture lesson about the parable to the sower. We read the story with photos, planted seeds in good soil and made mud pudding.

I think I'll have a chicken make a cameo in every blog post from now on...hahaha...just kidding.  

It worked out great to do it with cousins. Then Elizabeth came back just in time for Edwin and Edgar to nap and Max and I left on our date. We started out getting gyros, always a win!

And then made our way for a temple date. It was perfect so he had to take a selfie outside...and observe our wrinkly faces, i guess if I have to grow old and get wrinkly, it's good that I can do it alongside Max...also, he's been testing the limits of his beard...and for anyone that didn't already know...our last name translates to "Little Beard" in German. 

Anyway, both Elizabeth and I were so excited at how well our date swap worked out and we hope to continue it monthly. We both get dates and our kids get great cousin time, it is seriously a win-win-win! Why didn't we think of this sooner? 

The next day, Sunday, I got to help play the piano for the children's music time which is kinda fun. 

In the evening, the weather was amazing so we decided to light up our fire pit for this first time this year. It's one of our favorite summer activities.

Can you see more chicken cameos?

Check out Max's cool Sunday evening pants....

We cooked hot dogs and biscuits on the fire. Simple, and it kept my kitchen clean, I call that another WIN! Charlie's a little pyro...

We have been cleaning out our garage and found a whole lot of worthless baseball cards, so they added fuel to the fire. There was something therapeutic about throwing each card in one-by one.

Anyway, on another day, I let the kids have a picnic on the trampoline, but now they aren't allowed to do that for awhile because I had to ask them to clean it up a million times and they ignored me...

On another night we had a family movie night watching Bedtime Stories, the kids thought it was funny even though they didn't get all the humor in it.

On another evening, we took a family bike ride around Tyron Creek, it took more time to prepare the bikes and load them onto the car than actual riding but it was still fun and Miles hasn't practiced much on his two-wheeler since last summer so he was a little rusty but we still all had fun.

He's been wanting me to do a photo shoot of him with his new smile, and this is what we ended up with. So weird.

 And a picnic of course..

 Moving on...

I have never been able to curl my hair like it has been done in salons, but I finally got some curling wands, and I've been frying up my hair figuring out how to use them.

 One day I got to run a bunch of errands with just one kid and this is what he does to me...

 He thinks he needs to be outside at all times...but he has proven to not be very safe if I let him loose on his own.

Anyway, I'm going to share about the rest of Spring Break in the next post, because there are a whole lot of photos from our family hike and beach trip!