December 23rd: Hayden turned 9!!
He informed me a few weeks before that he wanted to invite some kids to his party. I didn’t know he was going to have a party so I scrambled to get something planned. Luckily, it was pretty easy once he told me what he really wanted was a video game party. He doesn’t ever have kids come over to play video games so this actually sounded like an okay idea. We ordered pizza, drank soda, ate cake and played all the rated E games. It was a hit!
(more about Hayden in his personal bio coming up)
I can’t completely forget about Christmas even though it’s been long over, here are some highlights from the year:
We bid on a beautiful tree at the Washougal Festival of Trees, a fundraiser for our local schools and we won the tree! So we loaded up this fully decorated amazing tree into our van and brought it home! Lucky we have a huge empty living room where we could put it!
On Christmas Eve we participated in the family Nog Run...luckily we were late and missed the actually drinking of the egg nog but still got to enjoy the run! Hayden survived the full 2 miles!
Christmas Eve was spent at our house, with the entire Stinchfield Clan minus Mike and Brooke! It was a fun night of food, games and Barb even helped the kids use puppets to tell the nativity story.
Christmas morning was wonderful as usual! The kids enjoyed it and were well spoiled.
The before:
The after:
This is what Tom wishes he got for Christmas! His brother Dave got a Boston Terrier puppy for his family
Christmas dinner was a formal affair at Kenn and Barbs and was wonderful. Then the kids enjoyed the “money drop” with the change that Papa has been saving all year. They all came home with a bag full of money! They are still saving it!
The rest of the break was spent with trips to JJ Jumps, OMSI, a trail run, and late night games every day. What a blast!
January started off with a bang as we celebrated with our friends the Balls. Our friendship started in Okinawa and they now live up near Seattle so it's been really fun to hang out! We had a fun weekend, although the cold wind kept us from getting out of the car after driving to Beacon Rock to hike! We had a fun time playing with the kids and actually changed all the clocks so they thought they were staying up until midnight, not 8pm....the neighbors did big fireworks at 7pm, it worked out really well!!
A few days later we got a visit from more friends from Okinawa, the Neal's!! It's ridiculous but I didn't take any pictures! We had a great time catching up with them and hiking in the rain and playing on the beach in the rain....where was my camera... it was so fun to see them!
We were sad to see our Okinawa friends leave but we took comfort knowing that we would seem them again. The Ball's invited us up for the 3 day weekend to spend time with another family, The Frank's who now live in Chicago. We all stayed with the Ball's and had a great time!! We ate, played games, went to the Children's Museum and even played in the snow!
Snow Day: Two weeks ago they cancelled school for two days due to the snow. The first day it was only raining down here in town so I didn't know and drove the kids to school only to find it closed! The second day it actually snowed down here! Tom and I tried to go running in the snow but it was raining and turning everything to slosh! Fortunately the kids still thought it was amazing and we had a good time out playing!
Concerts: We are keeping up with the fun of living near a big city with lots of great concert options all the time. So far this month we went to a City and Colour Concert and then saw the Milk Carton Kids again. Tons of fun!
Friends: We finally connected with a couple here in Washougal that we've wanted to get to know better. They came over for dinner and games and we had a great time! Hopefully we can start to do that a lot more often!!
Cape Horn Trail Run: Last Friday we had Anne and Peter stay the night with us and we went on a "legendary" trail run in the morning. We went to do the Cape Horn Trail like we did over Christmas break but this time instead of mud we found ice and snow. We persisted but it was such an intense run. It felt like we were literally running through someone's cooler of ice. Just stumbling over pieces of ice that would roll and slip under our feet. It felt like you were running uphill in deep sand for a few miles. Awesome... as we caused a disturbance in the forest the ice would fall from the trees. Fortunately, no one was hit in the head, I got hit in the hand and it hurt!!! We couldn't get near the nice viewpoints because it was pure ice and you could literally slip right off the edge. I'm the only one who slipped and although it didn't feel great at least I didn't slip off a cliff! The worst part was at the top of the mountain where there is a flat area that was covered in snow that had a layer of ice over the top. There was a freezing wind so you wanted to hurry but it was so slippery. You would slip on the ice unless you cracked through it to run in the snow. We had to run on our toes or heels trying to crack the ice with each step...again, awesome. Luckily, about half way through the snow lightened up and we ran on some mud and trail and got to enjoy being out. We made it back to the car just as some icy rain started to fall. Somehow, we still enjoyed ourselves and agreed we are glad we did it...
Well I think that's about enough on the events of the last little while... I'm sure I forgot something big but I'll figure that out later. Hopefully I can put together a little info on each member of the family and get that posted soon!!!
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