Exploring Spokane!

After Grandma Mary and Grandpa Dan helped us unpack all week, they went home, and we were on our own to explore the city. We started with all of the beautiful parks. We've been hitting up a new one every single day. There are so many! Winston's first order of business at the first park we went to was to poo out of his diaper, through his clothes  all over the swing. Of course, for the umpteenth time, I had no extra diaper, wipes or change of clothes, but Winston didn't let that spoil his fun. He's no party pooper. He ended up enjoying a diaperless park day in Daddy's Channel 5 sweatshirt, which made him go extra fast down the slide.

After visiting lots of Washington's parks, Robert took us to Idaho to play at their best park! We live like 30 minutes from Couer d'Alene. It's so beautiful there and fun to just go to another state whenever you feel like it.

 We've visited our new Children's Museum a couple of times.

 The kids loved everything about it!

 They all put on the play Rapunzel together, with their own little twists. Winston was a bear in hiding. Stanton was an alligator, and Jade was a drummer. 

It was so cute watching them dress up, make up stories, play and pretend! Our cousin came in town to visit us for 10 days, so she added even more fun to all of our new adventures!

 We also went to our new Science Center. There were a lot of cool hands on (and mouth on) experiments. The kids even got to make oobleck and hold reptiles.

When we got home they dissected owl pellets, like real scientists. It was pretty gross. I kept finding tiny shrew bones in random places for the next couple of days.

 Daddy took us to a large cat rescue and he arranged for us all to feed tigers.

 It was one of the coolest things we've ever done! They are so huge and amazing, and beautiful up close, and they look so soft, such an adventure!

 One of our favorite places to explore was Riverfront Park. They have rides and games and face painting and balloon animals made VERY slowly by the sweetest old man who looks like the Quaker Oatmeal guy. When you ask him how much he charges, he says, "a dollar or a smile."

 We've already been on all of the rides multiple times. We can't get enough of that place!

 The kids really like playing on the big red wagon there too!

 And they have the biggest splash pad I've ever seen. The kids look like they're in a hurricane whenever they play in it!

 We've gone back to Couer d'Alene a couple of times to play at Fort Sherman!

We had just planned on playing at the park there, but the kids really wanted to swim in the lake, despite the 58 degree weather. It was so cold outside but they just swam in their clothes and had a blast! I love that about kids! They're so adventurous and always ready for fun!

 We found free summer bowling. We somehow managed to still get gutter balls, even with the bumpers up, but we didn't care. We're not really competitive (except for Noelle.) Our favorite part anyway is just choosing our cool bowling names. Mine is Minnesota.

 We went to a Spokane Indians baseball game and got to meet, their mascot Otto the dinosaur??? I thought he was a dog with a plunger on his nose, but perhaps my eyes have deceived me.

We went to the pool. The life guards wear sweat shirts and pants cause it's so cold, but that didn't stop us from floating in the lazy river and going down the slides.
Then it actually did stop us about 45 min later. Our lips were blue and we were all shivering uncontrollably and looking like really bad parents cause ours were the only kids swimming, but it was a good time while it lasted.

 My favorite thing we've done here (or ever in my life so far) was going to Green Bluff.
We ran in the prettiest field of wildflowers I've ever seen!

 And hiked around Mount Spokane. You have to be an eye spy whiz to spot them in all of the trees.

 And we went strawberry picking! There are tons of farms there, and you can pet rams and pick whatever fruit is in season. It's like my dream come true! WE LOVE FARMS!

 After we picked the strawberries we went to another farm down the road where a really old farmer with his microphone turned up way too loud sang songs while the kids rolled down his hill. He sang "Margaritaville" and put Noelle's name in it. She cried after cause she said she felt special.

 Winston had the time of his life picking strawberries. He ate most of them before we got to the car. He said it was the best day ever!

I was happy as could be because I got to pick rhubarb, which I hadn't done since I was really little and lived in Minnesota. The kids had rhubarb sword fights, and then stepped in a bunch of mud and rinsed off in the spicket, just like real farm kids.
We went home and made the best strawberry rhubarb cobbler. The kids helped clean and cut the fruit and stir and bake and everything! Robert and Stanton loved the cobbler. Winston spit his out in the trash and Noelle refused to even try it because she heard that rhubarb leaves were poisonous. I promised her there were no leaves in it, but she said we couldn't be sure.
It was just the most perfect day ever!

Most recently we've been exploring the different libraries cause we're not a single library kinda family. (We like to spread our late fees all over the city.) This one was awesome!

The best part was they had Indiana Bones come for story time. He was such a great storyteller. I haven't used my imagination that much in years. I loved watching the kids faces go from surprise to forlorn to nervous to amazed to cracking up laughing! He let them play with his skull and touch his mummified monkey, super nice guy!

And since there's no Chick-fil-A for us to go to here every week, we've had to find a new hobby, so we've been exploring all of the farmer's markets (where I backed into a car while parallel parking and then accidentally left my car running the entire time we were shopping.)
It's a different crowd there than we're used to. There are no greasy play place fingers there, so I'm a little out of my element. There are a lot more gals with arm pit hair than I'm used to, and for some reason I feel the need to promise everyone that I'm really good at recycling. I also called radishes beets, which did not impress my new hippy friends, and Noelle mistook a tiny bar of homemade honey soap for a cheese sample, but we'll get the hang of these farmer's markets soon.
I bought Stanton a grape vine, which we found out after I payed for it that it wont produce grapes until 2015, (thanks for nothing) but Stanton was seriously thrilled to try and grow something! Noelle chose a loaf of bread and a brownie made by battered women (luckily she thought battered was a baking term, so I didn't have to do any awkward explaining for once) and Winston got raspberries, which he turned to jam all over his car seat by the time we got home.
We also learned that if homeless-ish teens at a farmers market offer to paint your face, they're just gonna draw random shapes on your child's cheeks and call it a turtle, so just give them the dollar and decline the drawing. Noelle's flower looked exactly like Winston turtle, which was just two circles and a triangle, not even touching. Stanton didn't even want one after he saw theirs.
We miss our Chick-fil-A nuggets, but we're enjoying our zucchini and berries, just like we miss Arizona, but we're enjoying our Spokane adventures too!