In a nutshell, we drove six hours to hit the aquarium

Hen was a touch crazy during our journey up north but my favorite part has to be the cop pulling up as Hen was going potty near one of the blocked off (Verboten!) entrances at Fort Lewis. He wasn't pulling over for us but I'm glad I had Hen on the potty Megan keeps in the back of the car instead of just peeing on a tree. I'd forgotten the negative consequences of sequestering a child in a car seat for a three hour drive, and I hadn't considered how the no-nap toddler would react once he escaped from the car. In two words, not pretty. Just about the time he started to crash from being overly tired, we decided to leave the hotel room and trek over to the public market. Lucky for me, Hen is still relatively light because when he decided he no longer wished to carry his own weight, I had to pick him up. Turns out Hen is a needler. He would poke and chase and touch and flick poor Avery. What do you do when your kid is frickin' annoying? We had a nice dinner, the kids were super cute and well-behaved, and we made our way back to the hotel to get the kids ready for bed. We ended up passing one of those plastic tub drummers along the way and both Hen and Avery had a turn. To sum up, Avery is the better dancer and Hen's the better drummer. (He gets that from his mama.) The next morning we had a fantastic breakfast at Bacco's - Hen ate his entire half of Belgian waffle and then proceeded to scarf down about a third of my ham and cheese omelette - and then we went down many, many steps to get to the aquarium. The kids had a blast. All was well until we left and Hen saw the very cool, ultra awesome squid toy Avery had. You can get a sense of his longing in the last picture. Oy vey.

On a photography front, I used the little Canon PowerShot this trip. The downside is that the small camera doesn't have the oh-so-handy vibration reduction. I'm a pretty shaky person. Of course there were pictures...

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