birthday the first

and here begins the series of birthday mania. on wednesday, april 25th we celebrated noah's first birthday with pizza and cupcakes. grandma and grandpa b. came down and were shocked to see noah down some greek pizza, olives and all.
noah was pretty excited about his very first cupcake. he was most excited about the frosting.

and yet still willing to share. what a sweet boy.

and he was also excited about his first birthday present, the touchy-feely book diggers from grandma and grandpa b.

arrival of the hobo-sapiens

a few days after danielle and napiqua's visit, another friend from the oregon extension showed up on our doorstep. rachel, my cabinmate from the OE, and her husband andrew are biking up the west coast and then back east to virginia, where they live. they stayed with us for a wonderful five days before heading north to vancouver.

we joked that rachel became noah's second mom while she was here. here she and noah are reading a bedtime story.

we took a mini bike trip down to the harbor (every bike trip seems "mini" now, compared to what andrew and rachel are doing). here's the FV desire, a boat that fishes out of petersburg, alaska. we bought some salmon from these folks, who we know a bit from petersburg and who do all their own processing too, which is cool. aaron also loves that the whole family is involved (parents and three kids)--the boys even wave signs advertising their fish on a busy street corner downtown, and they don't look embarrassed!

here we are at the park at squalicum harbor. i thought noah would be psyched about sliding, but apparently not!

but he did seem psyched to ride his own bike! no more of this chillin'-out-in-the-trailer business for him.

um, here's me getting ready to chow down on some steak.

and aaron chowing down on a mega taco.


rachel helped a TON with the birthday t-shirt project (more on that later). here she is in process (also in all my clothes).

in the spirit of t-shirt making, i made this shirt for rachel. it says, "the revolution will not be motorized," and on the bottom corner there's an outline of a bicycle.

sailing! aaron's friend logan took him, rachel and andrew for a lovely sunday sail on his boat. they had a great time relaxing and getting a few sailing pointers!



we went for a walk up sehome hill to the observation tower. i love the grumpy look on noah's face.

and then, sadly, we said goodbye.


noah thought about going along for the ride, but decided to stay here with us.

and the hobo-sapiens are on the move again!

a visit from napiqua

my friend danielle (from gordon and the oregon extension) came west recently from her home in leavenworth, washington, and she brought with her four-month-old napiqua. it was really fun to chat with danielle and to meet napiqua, who is super smiley and cute. (and, dare i say, elfin?) noah had fun with her too, although i had to remind him a few times not to poke her in the ear.

we'll visit danielle and napiqua (and woody, who i haven't yet met) in a few weeks on our way east to chelan for the weekend. we're excited to see the gibbs family farm (and aaron's super excited to check out their sawmill).

the tulip thief (a movie)

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the tulip thief

we had some fun on the porch recently peeking through the railings at the lovely red tulips. noah set his mind on stealing a tulip, and even though i knew it was destructive, i let him. here's a series of grumpy, triumphant, and tulip-glowy pictures.

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