Sunday and Monday with Grandkids

Sunday we went to Todd & Betsy's after church to watch Seth get his first taste of regular food. Betsy's parents were there also and we had a wonderful lunch prepared by Todd & Betsy, before watching the main event. Seth is getting some kisses from Daddy before we start eating lunch.

Seth has been playing with one of his spoons for awhile and usually puts it in his mouth, so he was ready to put the spoon with food on it in his mouth. He seemed really excited to discover that there was something good to eat on his spoon this time. Betsy mashed up a banana and mixed it with some formula, so it wasn't to foreign of a dish. The only problem was that he grabbed on to the spoon and didn't want to let go to get another bite.

After eating, showing his grandparents how well he can crawl, and entertaining 6 adults for several hours, he pooped out and took a nap on Mommy's lap as we got ready to leave.

Monday, when I got to Kari's house I discovered that they had friends visiting them from Spokane. I had gotten to know them when they still lived in Bellingham, so it was nice to see them again. The kids all had a good time eating a juice bar for their snack and playing in the pool to keep cool, while I huddled in the shade by the pool so I could keep an eye on them.

Annika is 2 Years Old

The day after we got back from Alaska was Annika's birthday. My parents arrived at our house a couple of hours after we got home, we had manged to get unpacked and some laundry started before they got here, but since I didn't have much food in the house, we ate dinner at a resturant. The next day we all went to K&K's to celebrate with Annika.

It was our first time to see Kyle's sister's baby. Seth is 2 months older than her, he's quite a bit bigger, but she has more hair. Both babies were excited to see one another and seemed to be talking to each other, when they were put face to face.
Who is that hiding behind the balloons? Annika loved her balloons, unfortunately when she let go of the strings, she couldn't quite reach them again, so all the adults took turns retrieving them for her.
She kept wanting to jump from Saben's bed to her mattress on the floor. She would say, "Watch, MaMa" (that's what she calls me), then she would twirl and jump to the other bed. She was so proud to have a regular bed to sleep in.
She did well in unwrapping her gifts and even allowed Saben to help her some.
You can't really see the necklace we gave her, but it says "I'm 2" and is a necklace that Kari wore when she was 2 years old.

Yummy, raspberry birthday pie! Kari had some extra whipped cream for the pie. After everyone had their pie, Saben and Annika decided the whipped cream was the best part and started eating spoonfuls of it from the bowl. Their parents were occupied elsewhere and Grandma thought it was funny and just took pictures of them. Annika had to lay on the table to get her share.

Bird Nest

I was watering my planter with the bird nest in it last night and all of a sudden the baby birds started flying out, some of them flew right at me and hit me in the chest. I freaked out, not because they were flying at me, but because I didn't think they were big enough to leave the nest. After they got out and were sitting around on the ground though, they looked a lot more mature than I thought they were. I was hoping they would go back to the nest, but when I checked this afternoon, the nest was still empty. I can't believe it took only 3 weeks for them to go from eggs to leaving the nest. Does anyone know if that is the normal amount of time or did they leave the nest prematurely because of being watered with the plants? I really did try not to disturb them and I did sucessfully get the plants watered a few times without disturbing them to much. Oh well, I tried to keep them from putting their nest there.

Alaska - Part 5

This will be my last Alaska blog, I promise. I really am trying to just hit the highlights, we took over 400 pictures, so this is just a taste of our trip. 5 blogs for a 2 week trip isn't bad at all, I think.

At one of our stops on the cruise, they were offering a "Search for Wildlife" tour, I decided at the last minute,(the night before the tour) to join one of the groups going out. There were several time slots to choose from, I didn't really want to go with the 7:30 group, but I figured I'd have a better chance of seeing something the earlier I went, so I signed up for the 8:30 tour. We took a bus out to an area where there was a trail leading down to 3 viewing platforms. The first thing they told us was to stay on the boardwalk, do NOT step off of it and that they would show us why later. We got to a boggy area and they proceeded to show us that the brown spots on the ground were actually sink holes. The guide put the stick he is holding into one of the sink holes, then brought it up, covered in a gooey mud. They said it wasn't like quicksand and you wouldn't continue to sink, but you would come out covered in the mud. Needless to say, everyone stayed on the boardwalk!

When we got to the first viewing platform, we were told there was a bear down the river that was making his way towards us and that if we stayed quiet, he might come up by us. As soon as we sighted him, we all started taking pictures, since we didn't know if he would get any closer or not. He was a young bear, they thought he was maybe 3 or 4 years old. He walked back and forth across the river, ran up the river and just seemed to having fun playing in the water. As he got a little closer, he disappeared for awhile, and I thought we probably weren't going to see him again.
All of a sudden, while the bald eagles flying above were distracting some of us, he appeared again, right in front of us. (I have my zoom fully on, so he wasn't as close as it looks.) I did get several pictures of him that close though. He totally ignored us and continued to make his way further up the river. When he was beyond the range of my camera, even with the zoom, I switched to the pair of binoculars I brought. I saw him notice some salmon jumping around him, sit down in the river, put his face in the water to look around for the fish, then try to catch one. It didn't look like he got one, so after awhile he gave up, stood on his hind legs in the water for a minute before continuing on his way. It was awesome to watch a bear in the wild, do all those things! He really put on a show for us! Unfortunately, I heard later, that none of the other groups saw any bears at all, I felt really bad for them, and couldn't believe how lucky my group was.

Our last stop had a totem pole park that we visited. This is a picture of a house the Natives lived in, the hole in the totem pole is the doorway into the house. In a real house, way back when, it would have been the only way to get into the house, and would have been smaller, so that you would have to crawl to get into the house. We were told this was so that, if the women and children were left alone and were attacked, the attackers would have to enter the house one at a time. Those in the house would pick up rocks from the fire pit and hit the attacker coming in the door on the head, and say next! I don't think they actually said that, but it was a good way to keep attackers from coming in their houses.

One last story, that I don't have pictures for. We had not seen any orcas during the whole trip, so we spent some time the last afternoon looking for some, since we were getting closer to home and knew they hung out down here. No luck then, but while we were at dinner, the captain made an announcement, that some orcas had been spotted about 10 minutes ahead. We were sitting by the window in the dining room, so we thought we had a great place to watch from, until everyone starting standing between us and the railing, trying to get a glimpse of the whales. We finished our dessert quickly and joined everyone at the rail, on the side of the boat where the captain said they had been spotted. We finally saw one fin off in the distance and were about to give up, when someone said that there were 2 orcas on the other side of the boat, very close to the side. We rushed over there and saw something I had never seen or even heard of before, 2 female orcas were riding the waves from the wake of the ship, just like they were dolphins. They were going up and down in perfect unison, every time they surfaced everyone oohed and aahed. It was a fun end to the voyage, the only down side was that we didn't have our camera with us. Rats! We could have had another dozen or so pictures to add to our collection.

Alaska - Part 4

We rode this tram car up a mountain in Juneau. The view was great at the top and there were hiking trails up there also with lots of wild flowers blooming. We also saw a marmot off the side of the trail while we were up there.
This is a view of the cable that the tram car was on. It looks really steep, but it didn't seem that steep when we were on it. There were 3 cruise ships docked that day, that's a lot of people running around Juneau.

We hiked up to this cross, which was placed on the hill in memory of a priest, who was instrumental in making the trail many years ago. There was another awesome view from up there.

We visited a nice flower garden in one of the cities, I've lost track of which one. I loved the row of delphinium next to this building.

We took one more train ride, this time we went up White Pass, which was one of 2 different ways the gold rush miners used to get to the gold fields.

Bird Nest Update

There are 4 baby birds in the nest now!

Alaska - Part 3 (Glaciers)

Our first day at sea took us to Hubbard Glacier. It was really fun to see the first pieces of ice start appearing in the water, then see more and more show up as we traveled to the glacier. It took about 2 hours to get to the glacier, the captain had to carefully manuever his way through the icebergs. Some of the ice pieces were very small and no problem at all, it was the bigger pieces, especially ones that were bluer in color(because that means that they are harder) that he had to watch out for.
A part of Hubbard Glacier.

This shows how tall the glacier is compared to the people standing on deck 12. We got to see several chunks falling off, which was totally awesome. You see them fall first, then you hear them; the noise it makes sounds like thunder, in fact the noise is called "white thunder". Seeing the glacier was definately a highlight of the trip!

The next day we arrived in Juneau and went to see another glacier. This time we rowed a canoe with 7 other people, including a guide, to Mendenhall Glacier. You can see the start of it right above Ken's head, there's also a waterfall on the mountain on the right that we went to also.

We didn't see any chunks fall off of this glacier, but there were icebergs in the lake that we rowed across, so we know pieces had been falling off.

This is the waterfall I pointed out in the earlier picture. It was huge and had a lot of water coming down it. We stopped at a beach by it, took a short break, and had a snack provided by the tour company.

After we got back in the canoe, we got to paddle close to the icebergs sitting in the lake. This is a small sampling of the glacier and iceberg pictures we took. As always, I got carried away with taking pictures of every piece of ice in sight. I blame it all on Ken, he told me once that it's better to take lots of pictures and delete the ones you don't want, than to not take enough pictures. Isn't digital wonderful!

Alaska - Part 2

I know it's been 13 days since I posted Alaska -Part 1, but after we left Fairbanks, we didn't have free internet access any more. I don't know how much it cost at the hotels we stayed at on our way to Seward, but it cost 55 cents a minute on the ship, so I decided to wait until I got home to do the rest of my Alaska blogs. This is a picture of the train that we took from Fairbanks into Denali National Park. The cars that the cruise lines have on the train are really nice, with dome windows for everyone. The regular train cars only have a small domed section, which costs a lot to sit in.
Once we got to Denali we got on a bus that took us into the park (the only way you can go through the park is in one of these buses). It was a 7 hour trip over dusty, bumpy, narrow roads, with gorgeous scenery (see the picture below). We were in the back of the bus with open windows blowing the dust in the windows, so at the end of the trip we were feeling pretty grimy. Our grand slam while in the park that Ken mentioned in facebook was seeing; 5 grizzly bears, some Dall sheep, a moose, and some caribou (which we found out are wild reindeer). We got pictures of everything but the moose, who was right beside the road when we got back to the entrance of the park, but it took off before we got a chance to take a picture. The bears were a long way away, so you just see brown blobs in the pictures we took of them. (More about seeing bears another day.)
Narrow road.
This is a valley in the park, with glacier fed streams running through it.

This is the best shot we got of Denali (otherwise known as Mt. McKinley), you can just make out the snow covered slopes under the clouds if you look hard enough. I was convinced that we hadn't really seen the mountain because of the clouds and smoke while we were there, and agreed to disagree with Ken, who thought we had seen it. I guess, based on this picture, especially if you zoom in on it, we did see it, even though it's not the view I wanted of it.

I thought the flowers in Alaska were especailly pretty and vivid in color. There were also some I was unaquainted with such as the dark colored flower in the picture below.

Our last stop before heading to the ship was at a Native Cultural Center in Ancourage. I loved the mukluks that dancers wore.

Alaska - Part 1

Today was our last day in Fairbanks, yesterday we were on our own and today we joined our tour group. We met another couple who came a day early also and have had a couple of meals with them. They are in the same tour group as us also, so it's nice that we've gotten to know them ahead of time and have someone else to chat with. This morning, we rode a riverboat down the river with several interesting stops that were well done, not your typical tourist trap, in our opinion.
The first stop was at a famous Iditarod winner, Susan Butcher's, sled dog training compound. She died of cancer a few years ago but her husband and daughters are still there. The dogs were hooked up to an ATV for a practice run. It was amazing to see the 10 dogs take off like a shot pulling the ATV.

At the next stop several reindeer ran out of the woods and started eating some grass by the river. I was really impressed with the antlers on this guy! The last stop of the boat was at an Athabascan Indian village, which was also very well done.

After going back into Fairbanks for lunch, we headed into the mountains outside the city. We made a brief stop to see the Alaska pipeline.

Our next stop was at a historic mining site. We watched the employees pan for gold, then got to try it ourselves. Everyone was given a sack of dirt and instructed to swish it around so the gold would fall to the bottom of the pan. It took awhile, but we finally got...

a few flakes of gold. This is what was in the bottom of my pan. Ken and I combined our flakes and when they weighed the amount we had, they said it was worth about $9. The couple we have made friends with, did a little better, theirs was worth $34. Tomorrow we head for Denali, we are a little worried about whether we are going to see the mountain. There are some fires going somewhere and there has been smoke obscuring the views of the mountains. It is definately weird to be going to bed when it is still light outside, but we haven't really had to much trouble getting to sleep. Whenever I wake up during the night, I can see light under the curtain also.

Goodbye For Awhile

Ken and I are heading to Alaska tomorrow for an extended cruise tour. We fly into Fairbanks tomorrow, have Sunday on our own, then meet up with the tour group Sunday evening. We spend the week making our way from Fairbanks down to Seward, where we catch the cruise boat on Friday the 10th, then cruise from Seward to Vancouver, BC, arriving there on Friday, July 17. Ken just discovered that Alaska has no 4th of July fireworks because they have 21 hours of daylight, so I guess we'll miss out on those this year. I'm sure seeing Alaska will be worth missing out on the fireworks! I'm going to try and do some blogs while we are gone, but we'll just have to see if that will work out or not. If not, I'll have lots to blog about when we get back!

Update on the bird's nest in my planter, there are 4 eggs in it now.