adventures in tuliptown

april in our area means the skagit valley tulip festival, which showcases the amazingly huge and lovely tulip farms in the county just south of us. the skagit valley is sort of a mini-holland, with flat, fertile river delta dyked off for farmland, and lots of dutch folks growing tulips. we headed down to the skagit valley in early april, and got a few glimpses of the colorful fields in full bloom.

and then we had pizza with our friends jake, deena, finn and charlie in laconner, where they surprised us with tulip festival beer!

adventures in blogging

okay. you'd think that after noah and i returned home from our eastern easter adventures we'd be back to life as usual, and i'd have lots of time to blog. wrong! somehow since we've returned things have stayed adventurous around here, which has been great but has left me with little time for anything else. but it is now a cloudy sunday afternoon, noah is napping, aaron is reading the paper, all our houseguests have journeyed on to other places, and i'm at the public market downtown, sipping peppermint tea and embarking on a valiant blog catch-up. i'm excited to share with all of you (who are you?!) pictures and stories of the fun we've been having this past month. (and i'm also excited to be using our new wireless card, away from home and that annoying yellow ethernet cable! AND i'm excited to be blogging on firefox mozilla instead of safari, which somehow means it is WAY easier to do fancy things like make hyperlinks and prettify my text (and use italics). and now i don't have to attempt to read HTML code. which is really not one of my strengths.

that said, i'll move on to our adventures in tuliptown.

home again

back in the northwest, we were greeted by a very happy aaron. also by this:


and this:


and this:

east for easter, final part

and here are the rest of our miscellaneous pictures. noah had such a good time with benny, eli, jude, asher and henry. we need some more little boys in our lives!







the night before we left, some of our favorite north shore-ers came to the julian house for dinner, and heidi brought this beer from her cool new town, portsmouth. it was super yummy. and it was wonderful to get to hang out with everyone for a short time. thanks to eric and eric for speeding up 95 in order to see us. and thanks to peter for buying a plane ticket to seattle! we'll see him again in about a week! thanks to everyone for welcoming us so warmly, as usual. and for holding noah while i showered.

joyous easter, everyone!

east for easter, part three

sunday morning after church noah and i went with the wassells to margie and ian's house in georgetown. we had a delicious easter dinner and a really fun afternoon.













more needle-felting: christina and sarah made all these wool bunnies for the kids to "adopt" from the "bunny hospital" after they redeemed their eggs from the egg hunt. each bunny had a name and a personality, and the kids were encouraged to choose accordingly.


here's piper.


benny chose neils. (i forget what his personality traits were. maybe too smart for his own good?)


and the great easter finale was the second-annual (?) coca-cola/mentos explosion, led by a very crazy scott. i don't know all the details, but i do know that the coke shoots way up there and noah does not like it.


by the end, we were all tuckered out.

east for easter, part two

noah and i were on our own in the caravan (the 2007 dodge caravan with sunken trunk, built-in carseats and state-of-the-art sound system, that is) on the drive south from vermont back to beverly. we definitely missed the presence of aunt molly, but we did okay. meaning that i fed noah donut bits the whole time. meaning that when we finally arrived at the julian house, there was donut all over him, me and the caravan. oh well.

here is noah hangin' out on the bed in the lovely attic guestroom at the julian house, reading his new books from grandma louise.



that night was the easter vigil at christ church, during which both baby asher wassell and baby henry carlson-lier got baptized. noah managed to stay awake for most of the service, which was beautiful. but we didn't make it to the wild post-easter-vigil party where everyone feasts on all the things they've done without during lent. instead we went home early and snoozed in our cozy attic bedroom. which meant that we were well-rested for...

easter morning!!
the wassell boys rushed to see what changes the "lenten garden" had overgone during the night. they were excited to see that it had turned into an "easter garden," with a butterfly hatched from its cocoon, flowers blooming and hares hopping about. (christina made the whole waldorf-inspired garden, needle-felted hares included.)

after they were done oohing and aahing at the garden, the boys rushed to examine the line of easter baskets in the window. noah had one too, which included one of his favorite things ever--a pacifier!


it also included this awesome springy bug toy, which the wassell boys named "red-red."


here's sarah reading to baby henry and eli


and all the easter cards in the window

east for easter

after a brief blog hiatus, wherein noah and i travelled through two countries and four new england states to see sixteen family members and twenty-two friends (and wherein noah did not sleep at all on the five-hour flight from montreal to vancouver), i finally have the energy to document our travels for you, our blog-viewing public.

the first leg of our trip was from the julian house in beverly to grandma helen's house in vernon, connecticut, for an early birthday party for noah. (pictures to come.) it was great to see grandma helen, grandpa peabody, auntie pat and rob, and cousin jen. noah was tired but well-mannered and he was quite happy to mess around in his colorful birthday cake.

we stayed that night at aunt tiff's house in groton, where we met five-week old baby hayden.


here she is with her proud great-oma katie


here's big brother jackson


and here are tiff, grandma katie, noah, me and aunt molly, who joined me and noah from boston back to vermont


we had dinner in lisbon with terry and john junior




and then we headed north to vermont. noah got a little tired of the carseat on the five-hour drive.


noah's aunts and uncles thought this was funny.