Snow

It doesn't snow here very often but we did get a little bit early December.

Hudson was disappointed.  He misses the snow very much and wanted more of it.  Lincoln, however, doesn't remember the snow in Utah.  He thought this was great.  He kept saying, "There's so much snow!"

Seals and Sea Lions

There was a group of harbor seals lounging around the rocks close to where we stayed during our Thanksgiving vacation.  We had a lot of fun watching them bob around.

We also had fun watching the surfers, paddle boarders, and kayakers try to navigate the surf.  The picture below is just around the bend from Devil's Punch Bowl.  If it wasn't so overcast and foggy you would be able to see the Yaquina Head Lighthouse just north of Newport.

We spent an evening in Newport eating seafood and watching sea lions.  The kids were upset that we wanted to take them for a seafood dinner.  They claimed to hate seafood.  We told them to just give it a try.  After dinner, they talked for hours about how much they love seafood.

Tide pools

The beach we stayed at during the Thanksgiving week was about ten minutes north of Newport.  There were fun tide pools to look at in the afternoon when the tide was low.  We found a lot of fun things: starfish, anemones, muscles, urchins, hermit crabs, and snails.

Thanksgiving at the Beach

We were very fortunate to be able to spend a week at the beach for Thanksgiving.  A family that wasn't going to be using their beach home let us stay there.  It was so great.  A much needed vacation.  Ethan couldn't get a whole week off of work so the kids and I went a couple of days ahead of him. We spent some quiet days watching the surf from the deck, playing on the beach in the morning, having quiet afternoon naps, listening to the waves at night, and the kids favorite thing - swimming in the pool.  It was very fun.

Little Zig Zag Falls

Early November we wandered over to Mt. Hood National Forest to hike the Little Zigzag Trail.  This is a great, quick trail for our family and we will be back in the summertime to let the kids play in the creek.  

It was pretty cold on this day, though, so no creek playing this time.

In fact, there were quite a lot of icicles.

The picture above shows the creek making it's little zigzag through the forest and the picture below shows the falls.

These are bat-cicles.  The icicles over the creek formed under the fallen logs in such a way as to make them look like bats hanging from the logs, don't you think? We call them batcicles.

Autumn

Autumn came and went pretty quickly.  It all seems a blur now that it is over.

A favorite family pastime is "going for a drive".  We love exploring the rolling hills of the area.  I'm not sure the kids love it as much as Ethan and I but we often find fun little spots we didn't know were there.  Like this view of Portland:

The kids must be growing like weeds.  It seems we are constantly buying new shoes or pulling out hand-me-downs for the younger children.

This autumn you would have often found the kids playing outside in the leaves.  We had many beautiful days.  The kids had a blast dressing up for Halloween.  We even made it over to Silver Falls with Ethan's cousin and her family.

We went on a fun little trail that takes you behind two waterfalls.

We are still having fun hiking and beaching - I have more to show you soon.

The Arboretum

A couple of weeks ago we took the kids to the Hoyt Arboretum.  It made me laugh to hear each of the kids accidentally call it the Arburrito.  

It's pretty huge so we only saw a portion of it.

The Arboretum is divided into different sections.  We wanted to see the redwoods so we started on the Fir Trail which took us to the Redwood Trail.

We were all quite excited to see the mix of redwoods which included the Coast Redwood and Giant Sequoia.  It was interesting to us that the redwoods had soft bark, kind of spongy.

The picture above is of a Dawn Redwood which is a very interesting plant.  Metasequoia, it's scientific name, is an ancient tree first thought to have come from the Mesozoic Era and believed extinct until a small stand of trees were discovered in China in the 1940's.  After the war the plant was studied and cones and seedlings were distributed arboretums and universities throughout the world.  Interesting fact from Wikipedia: "Metasequoia has experienced morphological stasis for the past 65 million years, meaning the modern Metasequoia glyptostroboides appears identical to it's late Cretaceous ancestors".  It is considered a mystery that this plant even survived in it's little nook in China considering it wasn't growing in it's ideal environment.  Another interesting fact: it's a redwood that is deciduous, meaning it looses it's needles in the fall! The needles even change color.  Isn't that an interesting tree?

It was at this point on the trail that we got hit with a downpour.  But hey, we are Oregonians now, eh? We just put on our raincoats and trudged on to the Oak Trail.  I had no idea there are so many different looking oak trees!  But no pictures because, you know, it was a downpour.  I didn't want to get my camera wet.  Me and cameras . . . and cell phones . . . we don't have the best track record.  Water, sand, they are dangerous.  I must be careful.

We tried to peek at the oaks through the sheets of rain but didn't glean much and ended up back at the beginning shortly thereafter.  So we decided to go to the zoo since we were quite close.

Oh, uh, by the way, I did drop my cell phone in a puddle in the parking lot when we got back to the car.  But it's okay!

Neskowin

On one beaching day we found ourselves in Neskowin and discovered it's a pretty nice place to hangout.  There's a nice little river that winds itself around the beach and into the ocean.  It's shallow enough for the kids to play in yet wide enough to still be exciting.  They love wading around through that river.

Neskowin quickly became one of our favorite places for beaching.

Camping on Whalen Island

A couple months ago we went camping in Whalen Island State Park.  While it wasn't our favorite campground, we did have a fun time.

Whalen Island is in a big bay.  It's a good place to go crabbing and clamming.  We took a bunch of equipment with us to do both but in the end we didn't end up shellfishing . . . Someone maybe forgot to bring his license.  Haha, oh well.  There was plenty for us to do anyway.

Lincoln and I didn't particularly enjoy walking through the mucky sand in the bay (it was too cold for us), but Ethan and the other kids loved it.  Maybe a little too much.  We had some pretty wet, sandy, smelly, gross kids in a very short amount of time.