Portland
A week ago we spent a Saturday in Portland visiting my sister.
Here we are on the drive down (Charlotte and Ila are sleeping, Nicole is practicing her first primary talk, and Isaac is tracking our progress on Zach’s other GPS, it’s the yellow and black thing in his hand):
You can only see the corner of Thomas’s blanket next to Ila. Here’s a little time-lapse video Zach made of our drive:
We met up with Sarah at a waterfront market. Here are three of my kids walking from the parking garage to the market. There were homeless people sleeping all over the place. You cans see some of them in sleeping bags in the background of these pictures:
Here’s the entrance to the market. It was kind of like what you might see at the fair back home in Ohio—it was full of tents with people selling things. Only there were a few differences, like the guy next to the port-a-potty yelling Bible verses:
Here we are eating some Greek food on the steps by the fountains with Sarah:
Portland is a hippie town and the market was a perfect representation of the culture. As we ate lunch, a little boy ran naked through the fountains and there was Andean pan pipe music playing in the background.
As soon as Nicole saw the fountains she wanted to be in them and she was a little impatient to get wet. She wanted her swimsuit, but I hadn’t brought it with us so she had to settle for a dress:
Ila hates getting splashed. She wanted to get wet, but she had a hard time approaching the fountains without getting splashed:
Walking back to the truck all wet:
Sarah and I filled an elevator with our 8 kids. We were also apparently very amusing herding them all though the parking garage, judging by the man in his car who could not stop laughing as we walked by:
Next we went to Sarah’s house. She showed us around and made us some treats while the kids had fun playing:
The next stop was the Portland Temple where Nicole colored a purple temple:
and emailed it to her grandparents:
I tried to get a picture of most of our kids together, but some of them (mainly Nicole and Levi) could not stop trying to take a dip in the fountains so this is the best that I got:
Our last stop was the rose gardens. Only we never really got to the rose garden part, we just played at the park:
If you look closely, you can see Thomas’s little teeth in this one:
And on the way home Ila gave Thomas his first french fry:
and his first chicken nugget:
We actually found lots of first chicken nuggets in his seat when we got him out.
My favorite parts of the trip were visiting at Sarah’s house and the park. I think next time we should just pack a picnic and spend the whole day at the rose gardens and actually see the roses.