Three Down, One to Go

fall/winter holidays that is. (I'll figure out what number happy days they were later.) Only two represented here. Christmas will get its own post. 

It was really important to me to make the Peanut a costume for her first Halloween. I finally decided to go as classic as it gets and whip up a bed sheet ghost using one of her crib sheets that didn't fit the mattress very well. It was a no-sew affair, I just used iron-on transfer paper for the eyes and mouth and did  a sort-of drawstring neck so that it would fit over her noggin but still stay on. She wasn't too sure about the whole thing, as is obvious above. I couldn't manage to get one shot where you can actually see the costume and where she is not flailing and wailing. Honestly, I love that picture that picture though. I think it captures the gap between real life and staged for social media-perfect nicely.

Then there was Thanksgiving. We decided not to fly with baby quite this early on, so instead of being back in Illinois for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we celebrated at home as a family of three. 

We managed to make a proper Thanksgiving dinner, though between talking to family on the phone/video chat and keeping up with required baby maintenance, we ate about three hours later than planned. Delayed dinner time aside, for a first attempt at cooking a turkey, it came out quite well, as did all the sides. And baby slept while we ate, so we actually got to enjoy the meal. As Greg's t-shirt indicates, it was not a formal affair, still it felt good to mark the "firsts" this season, even if doing so in this particular instance only directly benefited Mommy and Daddy. :)

Atmospheric Conditions

(Happy Day 56)

being just so were the cause of this spectacular sunset. We see a lot of wonderful sunsets here in West Seattle, but I hadn't seen one like this before and haven't since. It was a little bittersweet as Greg was away on business that particular evening. Luckily the pictures do it some justice.

Back to Vashon

Happy Days 54 & 55
We took both our friends and Greg's family, who were our next summer visitors, over to Vashon Island. Both times we returned to Point Robinson Lighthouse. 

Like I mentioned before I really, really love Vashon. Occasionally for kicks I go looking at real estate online wherever I happen to be curious about at the time. So after being on the island with our friends I checked out what was on the market there. I came up with a four bedroom 1914 farmhouse on just over two acres, the asking price of which was the same as we paid for our little two bedroom on a postage stamp in West Seattle. (Above photo isn't of that house, these are the keeper's quarters at Point Robinson. Unfortunately I didn't think to take any pictures while we were viewing the place.) The listing made no bones about it being a project, but as it sounded like just the kind of thing I desperately want to take on some day, I made an appointment with the agent and we went and saw it. 

Not that we could have taken anything like it on two months before becoming parents, even if our bank account came anywhere close to allowing it, which it does not. But it was fun to practice walking through a house with an eye towards restoration. It was truly everything I could have hoped for, enough original detail remaining to make it totally worth saving (down to the original, gorgeous wood burning stove in the kitchen), yet enough of a hard case as to be uninhabitable as is (one of everything needed in the new systems department). And a beautiful setting to boot. No view (mountain or water), but surrounded by meadow and woods and complete with a pond. It will definitely go down in the "ones that had to be let get away" category. Though I don't think it actually sold, just got taken off the market for winter. If nothing else, it gave me something to obsess about until baby came along. 

Both days that we went visibility was excellent. The view of Mount Rainier from Point Robinson is pretty spectacular.

Mount Baby and Mount Rainier. 

When we were there with Greg's parents, there was a little tiny car show going on downtown. I wish I'd taken more pictures of all the different models. I kept picturing anthropomorphized animals driving them out for a picnic. :)

Snoqualmie Falls

Happy Day 53
We expanded the being-tourists-in-our own-town-for-the-sake-of-our-guests effort to the state level and took the quick trip up to Snoqualmie Falls one day, only about a 45 minute drive up into the Cascades from Seattle.  

Puget Sound Energy has a hydroelectric plant at the falls and maintains the whole site very well. It's quite accessible (compared to my previous experience with hydroelectricity in Washington state) and therefore was packed to the gills with people on this particular fair summer Saturday. 

We made the steep trek from the upper observation area to the lower one.

Given the fact that I was seven months pregnant at this point, there was definitely some huffing and puffing on the way back up, but I remember feeling pretty proud of myself for not being on my bum eating bonbons anywho. :)

Own Backyard

Happy Day 52

After a trip to Pike Place on our friends' second day in town we wandered along the waterfront to Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. One of the best parts of having visitors in a place like Seattle is being forced to be tourists ourselves and actually get out and see and do all the things we've not yet gotten around to.

Written On Stone

Happy Day 51
Our first visitors of the summer were friends from home (Illinois) who came over the Fourth of July. They arrived pretty early in the morning so we fed them and then took them straight to Lincoln Park here in West Seattle for some instant PNW gratification. Lincoln Park is right on the Sound with lots of nice wooded paths in addition to the walk along the beach. Down by the water someone had left this nice sentiment behind.

Good Things in Small Vases

Happy Day 50 
This was the point in the summer when things got a little hectic. I was trying to finish up with my last bit of work before baby-induced retirement which I was hoping to begin before we played host to a series of summer visitors. Though there were plenty of happy moments and things, I just didn't always get the chance to document them. And then came baby. But I do have lots of pics from the rest of the summer and fall, some I actually tagged, some I didn't. So I'll just keep counting happy days here and am going to try to resume formal daily observation of the good stuff till I hit 100. Gratitude seems like a good thing to be reminded to practice regularly this time of year anyhow.
I think I'd been without flowers on the dining room table for awhile so I decided to fix that right quick by gathering this tiny little arrangement of astilbe, cosmos, and salvia from the garden. 

Date Night

Happy Day 49
Pizza in Seattle is bad. All but five places specialize in wood fired pizza and three of those five (estimates based on my own meticulous research) do some sort of kinda-New York style. Wood fired pizza in and of itself isn't bad, but being from the midwest, we desperately miss the deep dish and the thin and crispy and cut into little squares varieties. The remaining two pizza places here that don't do wood fired do deep dish, and one of those just didn't cut it for us. The other, Kylie's Chicago Pizza in the Fremont neighborhood is actually quite good. This was our first time trying it out and we've gone back whenever the opportunity has presented itself. Desperately wish it was located in West Seattle instead of up north (see previous post for reason).     

Besides discovering (in our humble opinion) the best pizza in Seattle, our evening also included a stroll under the Aurora Ave. Bridge to visit this guy,

the Fremont Troll.

Unexpected Happy

Happy Day 48
Traffic in Seattle is bad. Every single day. When I worked at the office of the company I was with, I had to commute from West Seattle to the northerly neighborhood of Ballard via WA 99, a good chunk of which is part of a massive construction project to take the road from elevated freeway to tunnel through downtown. And while there is technically more than one way to drive to West Seattle, the only way that makes sense when you're going to or coming from the north is over the West Seattle Bridge and onto 99 or Interstate 5, so in and around those interchanges can be a real bottleneck. On this particular day, if my memory serves me, 99 was completely shut down through downtown due to an accident so I was in the midst (along with all other 99 commuters) of trying to get to Interstate 5 to get home. I was still really hoping to not miss a happy day at this point, but pretty convinced I wasn't going to find something to be happy about. But, happily, in the Mercer median right at the on/off 5 point, one of the Department of Transportations got it right and sowed some stress relief. Maybe someone did a study that showed wild flowers in medians help prevent road rage? Worked for me.

Working Conditions

Happy Day 47
One thing I loved about my job in cultural resource management was NOT being chained to a desk in a dreary cubicle day in and day out. I got out in the field regularly, usually a construction site of some sort, but on this particular day the field consisted of the Central Seattle Public Library to conduct some research. I must say, the post-modern structure is pretty cool to behold inside and out. Though some of the earlier editions were definitely worthy of mourning the passing of. 
I am not working currently (that is, as an archaeologist). I am very much enjoying stay-at-home-mommyhood. Baby update coming up.