Our Ultimate Life: A Week in Washington

Prior to our trip to Washington I read "Smart Money, Smart Kids" by Dave Ramsey and his daughter Rachel Cruz. I got all excited about tracking the kids' chores and made this chore-chart-calendar-thing. I'm honestly a bit reluctant to start giving my kids cash because nobody can give change anymore because of Covid! Ha. Oh well.

We've had to make a few trips to I.F. for this-n-that and have taken the opportunity to hit Chick-fil-A. Ahhh...I still think about that peach shake.

Logan hanging out on Teddy's bed while I gave everything a deep water the day of our trip.

We decided to split the drive up to two days both on the way up to WA and the way home. This made things easier and worse at the same time. That drive is rough. We drove to Pasco for the night and stayed at an AirBNB apartment. The kids shared a queen bed and Logan did well considering he's still in a crib at home. We rolled into Puyallup around noon on Thursday the 15th. Justin and the kids stayed with his parents while I took the van down to the dealership to see if they could fix our DVD player. I asked them to look at a few other things while they were at it and they said it would be over $535 just to LOOK at everything. WHAT??!! I was genuinely baffled. Just...How? So I asked them to only take a look at the DVD player, thanks, and several hours later they hadn't figured anything out. We were supposed to meet Jon and Laura for dinner so I asked them if I could abort the mission and get the heck out of there - I'd pay the service fee, whatever, just get me out. Well thankfully they didn't charge me but holy cow lesson learned - I guess the dealership is a rip off no matter how you figure it! We went to dinner with Jon and Laura at this cute place in Sumner called Farm 12.

Friday morning we took the kids to the Nathan Chapman trail right by our old house. The kids went nuts on their bikes and explored the thrill of gravity with the downhills. Nobody wiped out 😁 They played at the park for a bit after that.

Emmett called me over and said, "Mama...LOOK at this BEAUTIFUL fossil" 😂

Friday afternoon it was time to hit Maris Farms. The kids loved the tunnel slide and the tractor ride. The adults enjoyed human foosball.

Saturday morning we took advantage of a mall being 10 minutes down the road and got some much-needed fall/winter clothes for the kids.

We had SO many hamburgers with these guys between all our traveling...they were in heaven!

Saturday afternoon we drove out to University Place where Laura works at a private school. She had access to the school grounds where the kids could play on all the fancy playground toys. Her girls are lucky enough to be going to school in-person while she works just a few buildings away. Talk about a dream set up!

We ate at Mod Pizza afterwards which I completely devoured - I forgot how great that place is. Yum!

My kids always get strawberry ice cream! Justin got "cookie monster."

Jon and Laura had us over to hang out that night. He let everyone have a go at his new VR set.

Sunday we did a mini-Come Follow Me lesson and had Eleanor's birthday party that afternoon. The kids got her a Frozen lego set. Judy made a seriously AMAZING Frozen-themed cake. Jon got Justin an "escape-room" themed board game for his birthday that we cracked open while the kids played upstairs. Ahhh...to hit a new milestone where the kids can take care of themselves without monitoring!

Went upstairs to check on the kids and Logan had passed out 😂 poor buddy didn't hardly get any naps during this trip.

Justin REALLY wanted to show Emmett the dinosaurs on Jon's VR set...this took a lot of time and energy to make happen 😂

Monday we hung out all morning at Jon and Judy's playing a few board games before we took off for Pendleton. In Yakima while we were coming up next to a truck a big rock got kicked up or fell out of the top or something because we heard a huge CRACK sound like someone had shot off a gun and we had a massive crack in our windshield! Gah! The Stress! We stayed in another AirBnB and the kids each had their own bed. They were a snap to put to sleep - thank goodness - after a long day of stress and driving. This is giving me hope for when they share a room one day.

Tuesday we made it home around 3:00. I took the rest of the week to recover 😂 We hit some seriously low temperatures over the weekend. I checked my phone this morning and it was 8 degrees 😭 It's going to be a looooong winter without having the church building access for the kids and adults to play.

The kids pretend they're dinosaurs and eat lettuce and spinach like they're herbivores. I'll take it!

I wanted to do the last escape room with Justin - just the two of us - and see if we could beat it. You'd think more minds the better, but not so. Sometimes it's like too many people have all the pieces of the puzzle and it's hard to put the clues together. We finished with 5+ minutes to spare! We only got stuck once at the very beginning and did the rest of the clues ourselves. Yay!

With the colder weather we don't get to be outside as much. This really pushes me to think of creative things for the kids to do. I've seen this idea floating around on the internet where kids do letter-matching. That was fun for about two minutes. Ha...I called that good for the day as far as fun-mommin' goes.