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We took a week off to go traveling all the way up to Eugene, OR (voted best gluten-free city, in fact). Along the way
we stopped in Santa Rosa and Eureka, CA, to stop and enjoy the rivers and lakes. Naomi wants to move up to Santa Rosa
because the air is clean and there is nature everywhere, it's a beautiful area.
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We spent a couple of days visiting Naomi's family, including her sister Hannah, shown here with her little boy. Her
sister Sarah's kids are also in the picture. We're visiting the Sequoia Park Zoo, it was a pretty nice zoo, actually.
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Along the way, we might have gotten lost in the forest and needed to check our map.
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Fortunately, as we were finding our way of the forest, we were lucky to not get sprayed by a skunk on the path.
(This is Desmond's stuffed animal, in case it's not clear in the picture.)
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The parks there are pretty amazing, they're part of the forest. So, you can play on the
swings and then take a hike among all these giant redwoods, it's pretty incredible.
This is a lake we stumbled upon, and that's one of Sarah's twin girls on the left.
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Miles is a climber just like the rest of the kids, but so far he's not ready to start jumping off everything the
way Desmond does.
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We visited a home-school group camping at Patrick's Point, along the northern California coast, and
spent a night camping there. This is Agate Beach, where you can find agate's if you have a sharp eye.
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Miles had fun collecting any rocks, agates or not.
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We passed the Trees of Mystery on the 101 and
stopped to ask Paul Bunyan some questions.
There's a guy that sits in the statue and talks to the tourists, it's pretty cool.
There was recently a This
American Life episode about the Paul Bunyan statue, you should check it out, it's at the very beginning of the podcast.
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There was a hotel in Oregon called Out'n'About that was all tree houses,
it was pretty cool, but way too expensive. Since they were out in the boonies,
their property had tons of fun stuff to do to keep the guests occupied, so we had fun playing around there for a while.
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They had a giant picnic chair Miles and Mia played in.
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The St. Simon and Jude Fall Festival came around again at the beginning of October. I've been going to this since I was born,
now I get to take the kids. They finally changed the rides this year, after 50 years, because a different ride company was running it.
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The object of this game is to climb up this ladder without falling off, it was pretty fun. Mia kept trying it with no luck, though
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We had another chicken die (we have no idea why), leaving us with only one chicken. Once you are set up for chickens, having more than
one is all the same, so we bought three more. This is Amelie's chicken. It won't be laying eggs for a long time, though.
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Our friend Gavin owns this rabbit, named Oreo, but we all enjoy playing with him, he's very sweet. We gave Sharkey, our dog, away, so
we'll be getting more rabbits ourselves. Sharkey was not working out. He harrassed the other pets, crapped and peed in the house, chewed
everything up, ran away all the time, and we were just not able to train him at all. No more dogs for a while.
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Miles is getting bigger. He's talking a lot now and still just as happy as ever. I took this picture at the park
with a new camera I bought, a point and shoot Canon S120. I found with the size of the Canon 5D Mark II, I just wasn't
taking as many pictures as I wanted, so I bought a point and shoot to carry in my pocket and it's fantastic. I took it to the
park and got some great pictures and it was so easy. That 5D is really heavy, though it does take incomparable pictures and video.
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Here's one from the park of Desmond. He looks so much older in this picture, he's growing up.
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The camera has a slow motion feature so we played around with that.
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I took the kids to miniature golf, it was pretty fun. The best part was that Boomers was basically giving away coupons for free rounds
of mini-golf that you could give to trick-or-treaters, so I got a bunch of those so we can go back all we want.
Normally it's pretty expensive.
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Halloween was a lot of fun this year, starting with carving the pumpkins. They didn't last too long, though, after a couple of days
they were fuzzy and oozing.
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Mia bought this rubber cat from the Halloween store, it was kinda creepy and she enjoyed it all the more because of that.
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Miles playing around with this bubble-gun we bought on our trip up north.
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The lips and hat were not for Halloween, she just liked them.
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We bought Mia her own video camera, and she did a whole series on finding a squirrel in our pomegranate tree.
It's a bit shaky, even after stabilizing it as much as I could, and it's a bit long, but it's really cute.
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There was a pumpkin patch down the street that had a bunch of bounce houses and slides, so the kids went on this Titanic slide. It
was huge.
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Amelie went as Perry the Platypus from Phineas and Ferb.
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Halloween night, everybody ready to get that candy. Mia went as a "dark bride", whatever that means, Desmond was a Ninja.
We ended up with a ton of candy, all donated to the Switch Witch for
this.
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I recently started taking the kids bowling, this is Amelie celebrating as she nails a spare.
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We recently went to a home-school festival (of sorts), and the kids got to make their own tiger puppets.
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Desmond with his tiger. He recently had a hair-cut so it's all short.
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Amelie at the home-school festival, she also had her hair cut. It used to be so long, it's a bummer she decided to cut it but it still looks okay.
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Mia and Amelie goofing around.
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Miles has been putting in the time learning to ride his scooter, crashing for the last couple of months,
but now he's got it down. I shot this with the little point and shoot Canon S120, and it's incredibly
stable video, the in-camera image stabilization on this thing is impressive.
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Until next time, watch out for those creepy black cats.
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