Outings

Every year at Christmas my sister makes a photo book for my parents. She asks us to send her pictures and the top five events for each person that year. While I was sitting there trying to figure out what my top five for the year are, I realized how much I prefer to expound and explain when I write. I fear I'm becoming rather long-winded in my old age,  ha ha. My history teacher in high school always told us that when we write, it's better to have a small diamond than a large piece of glass. But I say it's even BETTER to have a large diamond, right? I'm not saying every long post I write is a diamond, but I comfort myself with good grammar and the fact that nobody is forced to read my loquaciously lengthy litanies! That calls for an alliterative laaaaa.

Well I just proved my point without even meaning to, and that's not even what I sat down to write about. Back to the point: while I was thinking about my top five 2015 list and trying to keep it at a hundred words or less, I thought about how much I enjoy writing blog posts. But how to put "likes writing blog posts" in a more fun way on a top five list? That inspired me to do a quick word count estimate for Where the White Things Are 2015. I concluded that this year I have written roughly 100,000 words in blog posts! I then proceeded to do a photo-summary for 2015. This year I took around 10,000 pictures! Can we say documented, life?

It's amazing how many memories I have recorded with pictures and words. It's also amazing how much seems to have slipped through the cracks! When I look back to this summer even, it feels like ten years ago and I can hardly remember what we did every day. It's so easy to reconstruct memories while looking at pictures and reading old journals, but those memories are always edited and altered through the filter of time. There's no way to remember exactly how every single day really was. I guess that's fine, but I am kind of a bit sentimental when it comes to time passing and therefore I do my best to record it. It's all too easy to look back fondly and forget all the hard annoying things that happened. Who wants to remember those? My brain naturally grabs the happy and remembers it, discarding the blah. But those good memories are not balanced without both sides of the story! Hence my journal and blog and pictures of kids smiling and kids sobbing.

Ok, now that I've gotten that off my chest, I can proceed with the real purpose of this post: PICTURES! This past week Jeff and I divided and conquered: Jeff stayed home with Amber at night while I took Jay and Rose out on the town. We always prefer going on outings all together, but Amber has been teething and high maintenance lately so we decided not to rock her world too much with evening outings.

Outing #1, Saturday night: Sunnyside lighted farm implements parade. The title of the parade cracks me up, but the actual parade is pretty cool and fun: big vehicles decked out in Christmas lights, interspersed by parade floats, Christmas style. In an attempt to avoid the crowds and traffic, we parked around the corner (I thought) from the parade route. Turns out we parked around two corners and walked about half a mile in the cold to reach the parade. Jay and Rose were troopers, though, and we arrived in plenty of time to see as much of the parade as we wanted--about half an hour of it--before walking that half mile back to our car.

While we were waiting for the parade to start, we amused ourselves taking fuzzy selfies in the dark...

 Little camera hogs.

I loved the giant carriage--stage coach maybe--all lit up. Those horses were BIG, especially to us when we were sitting on the curb. 

Outing #2, Wednesday night: Carousel of Dreams in Kennewick. We could go to the carousel any time (although we've never been), but on Wednesday night they hosted a Christmas shindig there: donate a toy or two nonperishable food items per person and receive a free carousel token for each donation. We got four tokens and went straight in to the line. The place was PACKED. Jeff has meetings on Wednesday afternoons, so it was me and all three kids, pressing through the crowds. We happened to arrive at a perfect time and only had to wait for about two minutes to get on the carousel. It was an opulently sparkly ride, though the horses were somewhat rabid-looking. I was quite occupied with keeping Amber atop her bobbing horse while not passing out from the swirly dizziness that set in around lap three, haha. So I snagged a few blurry pictures and then endured to the end. Suddenly it was over and we were done. The event  offered Christmas crafts and a Santa visit, but when the kids saw the ridiculously long lines involved, they practically begged to leave. I was happy to oblige. Nothing like a 45 minute drive to ride the merry-go-round for two minutes! ha.

Jay noticed a concession stand selling hot dogs at the carousel and he informed me how HUNGRY he was. I asked where he wanted to go for dinner, and the blessed boy chose Costco. No problemo! $5 later the kids were eating their fill of cheese pizza and chicken bake.

We stopped at the temple to see what kind of Christmas cheer we could discover. There were no Christmas lights, but there was a simple, beautiful white nativity out front. It was perfect. We tried to get closer and have a look, but it was on a tall platform so we got as close as we could. I love white lights shining on white stone at night.

We stopped at Target on the way home for Jay and Rose to get Jeff's Christmas presents. Of course we walked through the toy section and Jay and Rose had to admire the enormous Star Wars and Frozen characters. What would a kid DO with those things? Just curious.

Two solo nighttime outings with my children at night made me very willing to spend a few evenings at home snuggled up by the Christmas tree with a book. 

Reality check: It has taken me all day to write this post. Today I'm watching a friends two little girls, age two and three. They have been playing happily, but Amber has decided to cry every time I put her down and all kids poop and eat and ask questions. So with a sigh of relief, I'll click "publish" five hours later.