Fake tidepools, moon jelly, and giant Japanese crabs - Oregon trip

The Oregon weather was rainy and cold sometimes and just plain cold other times during our trip. Every so often, there would be flashes of sunshine with no wind and in those times, we went to the beach. We were lucky to be inside or eating lunch every time it was raining and we learned quickly to enjoy the non-raining time, cold or not, outside.

On this day, we were planning to go to the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport and it was a perfect day to be inside with sporadic heavy showers.

This wall art showed the wing spans of different birds.


The large blue bird above Gray is a White Pelican. It was fun to see that wingspan since we see those birds near where we live. The largest bird on there was the gray silhouette just above the pelican. It's a Wandering Albatross and it has the longest recorded wingspan of any bird - this silhouette was 12 feet across. Impressive - and a bit intimidating - but not nearly as intimidating as another 'world's largest' animal we saw later that day.

The first exhibit we saw was unusual and so interesting. It was meant to illustrate how sea life can adapt to human involvement. The pillars you see represent the pillars of docks on the coast - they were covered with life. There were things on the floor of the tank like discarded cement pieces and an old tire - no outright trash, like candy wrappers - and they were covered inside and out with different life forms. It's not good or pretty, but the animals work with what they have.

Another really fascinating thing for Hannah about the above exhibit was the shape of it and how that affected what she could see. It was an oval and that hid some animals at certain angles and revealed others at surprising angles. She must have circled that thing 17 times, finding different animals.

The hands-on tidepool was by far the biggest draw for all of the kids there. The entire aquarium is staffed almost entirely by volunteers, most of whom are retirees. And they love kids, so they all want to be working at the tidepool.

The tidepool had two sections - the starfish/anemones and the urchins/crabs/clams/mollusks/sea cucumbers. They were separated by a rock wall so that the starfish wouldn't hunt the animals on the other side.


They showed us how the starfish eat and it was fascinating. They open up the animal they want to eat (if it's a clam or mollusk - the sea cucumbers and crabs they just climb on top of) and then, instead of ingesting it through a mouth and sending it on down to their stomach, they put their stomach into what they want to eat. Am I explaining it well enough? Strange creatures. We saw some extra large starfish in another tank along with some huge 'sun stars'.

This tank full of moon jellyfish was beautiful - the picture simply can't do it justice. The lighting in the room was dark and the lighting in the tank was blue and the jellies were white and it was hypnotizing.

This next tank could freak you out pretty easily. It's the world's largest crab, the Japanese Spider Crab.

And that crab that's looking like it wants to eat Gray is just a baby. These suckers can live to be 100 years old and grow to 12 feet (leg span). There were a few larger ones in the tank (about 6 foot leg spans), but they stayed farther back from the glass.

We learned that these used to be more common in the shallow waters around some Japanese islands but they're so rare there now that they're having to go farther and farther out and down to find them. At what point do humans not say "If we've depleted them so much, maybe we should hold off for a bit."?

Outside there were sea lions and seals...

(very bored sea lions and seals) and sea birds. This one's a tufted puffin.

In a few weeks, they're going to have babies there. Little tufted babies. I do squee sometimes. I'd squee for that.

Then we went back inside to the shark tunnel. In this exhibit, you walked through a tunnel with sharks swimming above, around, and beneath you - parts of the floor were glass so that you could see them swimming below you.


They had several types of sharks and rays.

This exhibit was Flat Kathryn's favorite - no danger of getting wet (she was understandably nervous about that after our first beach trip) or eaten (she was understandably nervous about that after having met my goats when she first arrived) - and she got to see a leopard shark!

This huge shark jaw belonged to the Megalodon Shark, a prehistoric ancestor of today's shark that makes Jaws look like a temper-tantrum throwing toddler of a shark.

They said that the Megalodon Shark was bigger than a bus and weighed up to 100, 000 pounds.

This antique diving helmet was set up for people to put their head inside and get a feel for how that would feel.

It was small.

This is the moment that Ains decided that she definitely wasn't a mermaid. She didn't want to have to wear one of these things because "I've lived on land too long, Mommy, so I can't bweathe by myself unduhwatah. I would have to weah this and I don't like it. It makes me cwazy."

Her daddy did fine in it. (I find it hilarious that his hat and sunglasses are on top of it.)

But I would go crazy in it too. I was claustrophobic before my head was all the way in it.

After visiting everything they had to offer inside and out, we took a walk around the perimeter and stumbled on this lovely kid's playground with animal statues.

We stayed at this park for over an hour. Something happened to Ains here. Her life turned into a musical. It was like something out of South Pacific.

"Some enchanted evening ...."

I'm just kidding. It was mostly mermaid singing with some improvised toddler show tunes about aquatic life thrown in.

Hannah tried to involve her in her underwater dolphin race ...

which she would have lost since she had a passenger, but Ains wasn't biting.

She was singing a beautiful mermaid song.

Gray thought they were all nuts.

Hannah challenged him to a 'Tortoise and the Dolphin' race. He cleaned her clock. It was the extra weight.

There was another little girl at the playground with her mother and grandmother. They sat on the benches watching our kids play and she seemed shy, so Hannah came and asked her to play. The adults encouraged her, and she had fun sitting side-saddle on the dolphins, but when the game got more energetic and she tried to stand on the dolphin's back, they pulled her away saying "We don't climb on the animals, sweetie. Some people behave that way in public, but we don't." And they left. I had to explain that to Hannah, and to be honest, it confused me. This was a clearly labeled park with animals clearly designed for children to play on. I would have liked to understand their point of view better. (ETA: About an hour after I posted this, out of the blue this paragraph came back to me and I thought "That's funny. It's a bit like the South Pacific song "They've got to be taught." Just a bit, but it was still an interesting similarity with my joke above about Ainsley singing South Pacific songs.)

After the playground we went .... back to the fake tidepool. For an hour. I visited the bookstore. That tidepool was a lot of fun, but the bookstore was too. Then we went to feeding time for the seals and sea lions and they didn't look so bored after all. They were having a lot of fun. We walked back to the truck in the sun, opened up the tailgate, made sandwiches, it started to sprinkle, so we climbed in the truck, ate our sandwiches and drove to Cobble Beach. By the time we got there, the rain had stopped and we were ready to explore. It was great timing.

I'll tell you about that tomorrow. It's late and I am so tired and Cobble Beach deserves its own post.

First time touching the ocean. - Oregon post.

Our third day started with us stopping at Danni's house again to pick up Hannah's Nettie doll that had been left there accidentally. Props to Danni for noticing it and letting us know before we drove past her house again.

We drove from Portland to Newport that day with a stop in Tillamook at the cheese factory.


It didn't need to take us an entire day to get from Portland to the coast, but Matt has a very relaxed vacation philosophy. When I was a kid, my dad would throw all ten of us kids in the van with all of our camping equipment and drive us on a three-week vacation all of the way from Oklahoma to Montana with stops along the way at National Parks, family visits, and reunions. I remember looking at the calendar for the trips and being in awe of the military precision he'd planned things with. It was necessary.

But a trip from Idaho to the Oregon coast for a week is so much easier. I planned the first two days carefully, but traffic and weather ended up tweaking those plans a bit. After those days, we had no real plans - Matt wanted to see the docks and boats and I was demanding a real seafood dinner - so we were taking it slow and easy and Matt refused to make solid plans and I was going to have a nervous breakdown.

Then we got to our campground, checked into a yurt, and walked to the beach.

It was cold and windy and the ocean was loud and large and it was beautiful. Hannah touched the ocean for the first time.

And I converted to my husband's vacation philosophy. The next three days were absolutely amazing, filled with "Why don't we..." and "Wouldn't it be fun if we ..." and "Let's drive down there ..." and "I'm going to sit on this beach for the next few hours ..."

The campground we stayed at was suggested to me the day before we left by a lady in the Leonberger rescue group (trying to help me re-home Butterfly). It was a wonderful campground, Beverly Beach. It was near the town we were exploring, right next to the beach, and had yurts, which was a nice compromise for my husband, who likes hotels, and me, who likes tents or campers.

The kids loved it, of course, and it was warm and dry.

We spent the two nights here and if we come back, I want to stay here for a week and spend most of that at Cobble Beach. But Cobble Beach is two posts away.

For this night, we were just glad to have a warm place to dry off and showers nearby. We needed to dry off because a sneaker wave got Hannah and me - and Ains a bit, but don't ask her about that or you'll see a still fuming three-year-old - on our beach walk. So Ains got to touch the ocean for the first time too. I think Matt even helped Gray put his hand in, but I was too busy trying to keep Hannah from getting washed away while looking for fossils in the rocks along the water's edge. Dang dinosaur movie.

Fun fact. Little kids *really* want to sleep on the top of a bunk bed. Really, really, REALLY want to. Until everyone's set up and tucked in and they realize that they're not next to Mother. Then Daddy gets to sleep on the top bunk.

Oregon trip, continued.

Our day in Portland started out with a trip to OMSI - the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. OMSI is an amazing museum built with kids in mind.


We had meant to go to a planetarium show there the night before and then to the museum itself and a dinosaur show the next day, but since we got stuck in traffic the night before, we had to do it all in one day. This ended up being a blessing in disguise since the day we did it all on was $2 admission day with $5 shows. Absolutely amazing. The special pricing hadn't been mentioned on their website, so we just lucked into it. Saved a ton of money.

Most of their exhibits are hands on and quite a few are built strictly for playing. It was obvious that the people who designed them believe that children learn through play.

This exhibit was a large sand and water box with houses, bridges, fences, and animals in it. It was designed with water coming out of several 'hills' at one end and working its way down to drain at the other end. There were always about ten kids working in this box at a time, moving all of the things around and rearranging the terrain to let the water flow in different areas.

If a kid near you moved their sand, you could find your bridge flooded downstream. If someone left and their sand stayed still, you might end up with a lake. So much fun. For some kids, this was their favorite spot. There was a little girl there when we arrived and she was still there when we came back through after our dinosaur movie.

The day we were there, there were two main exhibits in addition to their normal ones - a paleontologist themed exhibit with a huge tyrannosaurus skeleton (still not sure how we got out of there without getting a picture of that)

and an astronaut themed exhibit that the kids didn't show too much interest in.

In the paleontologist exhibit, you could watch paleontologists at work cleaning real fossils (they were working on a stegosaurus leg while we were there).

There was something for everyone there.

Ainsley's favorite exhibits were spread out throughout one floor of the museum. She gravitated towards any exhibit that had to do with the human body. This real heart had her mesmerized.

And this puzzle. I want one of these puzzles.

And the 'How babies are born' exhibit.
She stood there for over seven minutes and then had to go back through the whole baby exhibit twice more.

Hannah, loved the infrared exhibit.

She was startled that Nettie didn't show up on the screen. Even if she is a doll, she's real, so shouldn't she be on the screen with the rest of the real humans? They had a hand cooling and warming station so that you could see the effects of that on how you appeared on the screen.

Then there was the very powerful and kid-friendly microscope.

And the animal track matching game.
Grayson enjoyed the playgrounds scattered throughout the museum.


The museum had a little kids section that was so well designed. There was a sand play area,
and a water play area. A train track to play with, a building blocks area, an experiment station. A nature play area where the kids could climb into the homes of different animals built to their size and even become a family of chipmunks.


It was the eagle's nest that Flat Kathryn ended up liking the most.

She's so quiet and very easy to please.

The dinosaur show was at the 'OMNIMax theater' in the museum and it was like nothing I've seen before. The seats were nearly vertical and the screen went over the top of your head. As we climbed to our seats, Hannah said "You may need to hold me up, Mother. I've got vertigo."

After the planetarium show, we headed out to visit an online friend, Danni, from On The Way To Critter Farm, who lives in the area. We had so much fun with her. (All of the following pictures are from Danni, bless her heart. My camera battery was dead.)

The girls got to meet their first llamas.

Oh, those were sweet things.

And their first donkeys. Ainsley *loved* the donkeys.

Their favorite animal, though, was the bat in the barn. For ten minutes on the way back to the hotel they were singing their echolocation song. I never thanked you for that, Danni.

Danni has the coolest toys.

These hats have velcro on them and you throw soft balls at each other's heads. Now Ainsley wants a play veterinarian kit just like the one Danni had.

It was only my second experience meeting someone from 'online' and she couldn't have been sweeter or better with my kids.

As we were leaving that night, Hannah said "Can she be one of our every day friends, Mother?"

She was that nice.

Everyone but Matt fell asleep on the way home. Thank goodness.

Readjusting to the rhythm of daily life.

Milking, riding bikes and scooters, crafting, gardening, laundry, and so much playing ...


We're getting back into the swing of things here.


How did we survive without dress-up clothes for an entire week?

And Mod Podge.

I've got pictures to get up from our trip for family that wants to see them, so bear with me as I get them put up throughout the week. Those posts will be picture heavy - but such *cute* pictures, so it's worth it. Right?

About mothers.

We're home. I have lots of chores, unpacking, and blogging to do and I realized that today's Mother's Day.

For the past few months, I have wanted to do a lovely, stirring, heartfelt post on this day about the women who have been important in my life, but I have neither the time nor the energy for that.


I'll have to save the post for another time. I wanted to talk about the influence for good that all of my aunts and grandmother had in my life, even though they only saw me once a year for a few days. I wanted to talk about my sisters and the source of strength they've been to me as we've all grown out of our childhood and the mother we had and into the mothers that we want to be. I will, in a future post, talk about a cousin who became a close friend and a motherhood mentor -though she likely doesn't know it - and, randomly, another cousin's wife who has - though she definitely doesn't know it - been one of the best examples for me of a calm and loving mother. I can't forget the midwife who was there when Ains and Gray came into this world and who treated birth like it was a normal, natural part of life and not necessarily a medical event. Then there are those who I've never *really* met - the close group of online friends who were a source of support and information and laughter in this mothering journey, especially when Gray went into the hospital. And all of you, who I've met through blogging (including the two of you who I *have* been lucky enough to meet), who have given me ideas and who let me see the kind of supportive, struggling, empowering, and really fun mothers you are.

Happy Mother's Day to all of you, in the States or outside of the States. Thank you for being a part of my life, and maybe I'll get around to writing that post next year.

Right now I need to be in my garden.

Crossposted on It Blows Here.

A real vacation.

Family vacation time. It's not often with my husband's job that we can all go on a proper vacation as a family. For the next week, we are doing just that, traveling to the west coast of Oregon. Last night we made it as far as Pendleton and were lucky enough to get a hotel with a swimming pool.

We have one of my friend's kids traveling with us - Flat Kathryn - and she came to the pool with us. Unfortunately, she forgot her swimsuit, so she had to stay by our towels the whole time.

She's a good sport.

This morning we went to the Pendleton Woolen Mills which was very cool. In the store we saw some beautiful blankets. This one was my favorite. The bottom of it is silhouettes of people looking at the stars, the top is constellations. Beautiful. Expensive, but beautiful.

The kids found little stuffed lambs and had the good fortune (or the good sense) to show them to their daddy before me.

"Baa Baa Black Sheep is telling you to buy this shirt, Mommy."

This very pretty $85 shirt.

A few minutes later, I hear laughing and turn to see some ladies giggling because Ains was dragging this huge sheep by its ear.

What are you doing with that? "Baa Baa Black Sheep needs a mommy to nurse on. It's a weequiament." It is a requirement, sweetie, but we're not taking that sheep home.

Then we drove farther west to The Dalles area and visited an area with some beautiful waterfalls.

We saw our first moss-covered rocks, which was more exciting than you'd think because a moss-covered rock is the main character in one of our favorite books.

And a very exciting thing happened - Grayson finally did his first real sign. Train.

We had to stand there and watch the entire train go by while he signed 'train' the whole time. Very exciting.

At the next falls, Ains found "the stwangest thing in the whole wowld."

In-between the cracks on the rock wall, behind the moss, were worms. Living in the wall.

"I can't beweeve they're weal! They're weally weal!"

Multnomah Falls was the last one we stopped at. It's a two-level falls with a bridge going over the bottom one.

We hiked up to the bridge and looked over.

"Holy crap!" is what that little chihuahua is saying.

Then we went back down and had lunch in the Oregon drizzling rain.

For the record, I didn't do that to him. When I put a stocking hat on his head, that's how he wears it.

Everything grows so much faster out here with this much moisture. At home we're just now getting dandelions. Here they're already one foot tall.

On our way out, Hannah saw a sign that sent her into a high-pitched squeal. "That sign says Ains on it!" So we stopped.

Our next plan was to go to a planetarium show in Portland and we were on schedule to get there an hour early. We never got there because there was an accident fifteen minutes outside of the city that kept us sitting on the interstate for over an hour and a half.

So we'll try to do the planetarium show tomorrow. That left us with a free night in Portland. I wanted to go to a bookstore I heard about in downtown Portland. It's called Powell's and it's the biggest bookstore I've ever been in.

It covers an entire city block and is four stories full of books. When you walk in, this sign, telling you where to go for which type of books, greets you. And they give you a map. And laugh at you for being a country girl who takes a picture of their sign.

I dropped everyone else off in the kid's section - Matt's a good sport -

and went to explore.

It was overwhelming.

After we each got a book we wanted, we headed back to the hotel.

Don't mind them. They think that umbrellas are necessary in Oregon whether it's raining or not. It's a fashion statement.