Zoe's Camera

I just added a slideshow of photos that Zoe has taken with her camera - click on the tab for Zoe's photos. It is a Picassa Web Album, so you can click on the slideshow to view it larger, etc.

She loves to take pictures of the dog and her stuffed animals. We bring her camera with us everywhere that we go now.

By the way, the blueberry pie [see below] is quite delicious. I am glad to see that the kitchen where she makes them is just a few miles away.

Saturday Market 9/15

We went to the Edmond's Farmer's Market this morning. I bought a small blueberry pie that claims to be "the best pie in the world" [she was out of cherry], 2 zucchini, a "bag 'o basil" for $1, 4 pounds of pickling cukes, fresh dill, hazlenuts, radishes, garlic, green beans and flowers. Zoe told me that what she would like to buy is a "beautiful necklace" but we settled on a beautiful glass bead bracelet from the people who make things out of recycled glass.
The market ends in a couple of weeks and I will miss it so much. There are some year-round markets that we could drive a bit farther too. But part of what makes the Edmonds market so enjoyable is the convenience.
Zoe is begging me to go to the kid's museum today. It is Pirate Day there, and she doesn't know about it, but I am thinking that it will be more crowded than it usually is. There will be pirates and treasure maps and some kind of boat outside they can climb on. It actually sounds like fun. So maybe I'll be an awesome mom and just go. We have a membership so it's always worth it, even for just an hour.
I am going to eat the pie now.

Ocean Shores Slideshow #2

Ocean Shores Slideshow #1

Ocean Shores

 

We drove to the ocean on Saturday morning. This is Zoe's first time at the actual ocean, but she has seen beaches and waves her whole life so it's just a really big beach and really big waves. We spent the afternoon on the beach behind our hotel at Ocean Shores.

 

For dinner last night we drove up the coast to an actual restaurant that has good reviews. In the town where we stayed last night - Ocean Shores - there are a lot of local, fish shack, bad pizza, microwaved Mexican type places. They are reviewed as "spendy" and "terrible" so we were thrilled to find Mill 109 in the new town of Seabrook. After our early dinner we walked down to the beach and it was gorgeous! The remote location meant that we were the only people out there for miles. It was quiet except for the waves. We walked across the sand and took pictures.

I've never been on the beach by myself. It is magical. Washington beaches are so beautiful.

 

Seabrook is an 8 year old development that has been designed with every coastal cottage rental detail in place. Right down to "old" bicycles with big baskets leaning against fences for you to ride. They are still building many parts of it, and some of the homes are for sale. The cottages are gigantic and built to be rented by 20 people for a week or a summer. They have gourment kitchens and fireplaces and jacuzzis and outdoor spaces and rocking chairs on all of the porches and balconies. And you just walk across the street to the ocean.

 

These are just a few photos I took with my phone. I will post our pretty beach pictures a bit later.

I don't know.

So this morning the internet is quick & smooth and the 1000 pictures that mysteriously disappeared from my computer yesterday [ahhhh!] imported into Picassa this morning [weird]. And then Google told me that they improved their photo uploading, and they did in fact make it faster & easier to move things around and put slideshows from web albums onto blogs....
so...
I guess I'll keep trying this.
I was thinking this morning that it will be fun when Zoe can update this herself. That day might not be too far away. It's impressively scary how good she is at using a computer. And she is secretly able to read much more than she let's on, I think.

I am also going to work out a way to turn a blog into a book. I want to do a "first five years". I haven't seen people offering this as a service... maybe I could develop a little home business.

planting a garden

 

I have a bag of old seed packets that we keep on the back porch for emergency garden planting. It happens fairly often. Zoe watches a show where somebody plants something and she immediately has to go outside and try it herself. We dumped a bunch of seeds in the dirt under a tree [lettuce, zucchini, sunflowers, radishes, marigolds...] and Zoe turned it into a mud puddle. An hour later she told me "I've been waiting a long time for those seeds to grow."

 

Then I saw a squirrel digging it up.

 

We'll see what happens.

 

Edmond's Pier Slideshow

We took a walk on the pier and around the beach after breakfast one Saturday morning. Coco does really great when we take her with us. She doesn't bark at other dogs or bother anybody or try to run away. She just likes to look at stuff and smell the air.

Zoe is actually much more of a headache. It's too sunny, it's too much walking, the ice cream shop is closed, there is sand in her shoe, there aren't enough shells on the beach, she really wants her own fishing pole, she can't see the crab I'm pointing at in the water, the jellyfish will sting her, there are no whales.... 

There was a little boy at the end of the pier fishing with his dad. And while the dad was VERY nice to Zoe and answered her 100 questions about what they were doing and was almost willing to let her hold his fishing pole, his little boy wanted Zoe to stop bothering them. So we had to pull her away from them and make Pete promise to take her fishing sometime soon. I'm not sure what part of fishing she is excited about, or what she would do if we actually caught something.

Bouncy House slideshow

A few weeks ago we met Zoe W and her mom, Jenny, at a local park where the city was having a free summertime concert & kid's play area.

Zoe W was Zoe's first friend when we started preschool a year and a half ago. They call each other "Zoe H" and "Zoe W" and if they are together they will both ignore any reference to plain "Zoe" so I have to say "Zoe H, would you like some more milk? What about you, Zoe W?"

When they talk to each other they say
"Zoe W, do you like my unicorn?"
"Yes, Zoe H. I've seen it before.""
"But, Zoe W, do you want to hold it?"
"Sure Zoe H. Thanks"

We had a lot of fun at this park. Pete was so excited that they were selling $40 snowcones [maybe it was $4], he could not wait to get one. And then they didn't have a lot of flavors, so he got orange and root beer or something gross like that and it was chunky ice in this little leaky cup.

I'm glad the face painting was free because Zoe was NOT impressed by a volunteer/mom who could not manage to make her look like a tiger. She kept giving Zoe the mirror to look at and Zoe was saying "No. I need orange and black stripes! I don't look like a tiger!"
We had to just walk away.

end of the blog?

Hello!
I am considering ending these blog updates. I see that the older blog posts are missing the images, I don't know if I deleted them somehow or if they are archived, or if they automatically get deleted after a certain time...

It's also become really difficult to upload photos & videos. Mostly because we switched from a wired internet connection to a WIFI connection at home and it just isn't as fast or dependable.

And I get the feeling that not many people are visiting this blog anymore anyhow... from questions I get like "you have a dog?"... so .... maybe I will just do some shared slideshows on a cloud drive. If you want some Zoe stories you can call or skype or send an email.

I won't delete this, and I'll post links to photos here.