Washington

 In Washington we visit Grandma and Grandpa Cows. It's summer, and that means farm work, all day, and almost everyday. 

We also saw a lot of the newest nephew to our family. Evelyn loves to try and pick the little kids up and carry them around. It's usually a little more than she can handle. :)

 Riding Grandpa's new tractor with Uncle Ryan. It's one of those giant ones, and the first John Deere tractor on the farm that I can remember. 

 Ben rode his bike here a lot as well. He enjoyed long stretches of road without any stoplights, just like Idaho. 

 Our whole family decided to take a short two-day trip to Mt. Rainier. When we finally got up to the Paradise viewpoint, this is all we saw. Fog. It was so cold up there. That's the second coldest we've been since we moved to California, behind our Christmas trip to St. George. It should have started snowing, just for effect. All we had were sandals and light jackets. I was smart enough to pack jeans, thankfully. 

 And there was still plenty of snow on the ground, in fact. So much that unless you were equipped for the snow, you couldn't really explore the trails at all. There was lots of water, and lots of mud. Evelyn had thawed out enough at this point to declare she was hot and didn't need her jacket anymore. I think it was just peer pressure. My nephews are a lot tougher when it comes to temperature. They rebuilt the Visitor's Center here since I last visited, and it was cool. Not as cool as the old one though. It was a place to get warm at least!

We headed down off the mountain and to our campground. Now, it wasn't too cold down here. Just raining/misting on us. We were kind of not prepared for this. It didn't rain a lot though, and we all hoped the weather would be more cooperative the next day. 

 This is only the second time our kids have been camping, and I daresay, it was far more successful this time around. The kids loved it. 

Gordon and Clayton had a fabulous time beating this dead tree with sticks, climbing all over it, and jumping off of it. There was no running off of children, and no mosquitoes or hornets. I thank the cool, rainy weather for that. 

The next morning, we broke camp and found the rain had gone overnight. We headed down to the old ranger station at Longmire, which was crawling with people. We crossed the suspension bridge, where we finally found parking and the kids enjoyed throwing rocks into the river there. We noticed after a while the clouds were breaking up, so we headed back to the cars to drive up to Paradise to see if we'd get lucky and view Mt. Rainier. 

Success! Ev was happy to be here, even if she didn't look it, and Gordon is doing some cool guy hand motion and sound effect. Such a goofy kid. 

I was going to put a picture of Tyler and Nicole here, but I then I remembered her 8 month old pregnant belly, and thought better of it. Even though she isn't huge. 

 We drove down to the Grove of the Patriarchs, a section of old-growth cedar trees. They're 200 to 300 feet tall. Gizmo had to ride in the back pack because he wasn't allowed on the trail. There was a suspension bridge to cross here, and lots of mosquitoes. The kids enjoyed running around and the picnic lunch we had. 

 The last stop on the route was Sunrise, a viewpoint at 6400 ft. It was cool here too, but the trails weren't quite as snowed over here, so we could walk around a little and see some hikers tackling Mt. Rainier. The kids liked playing in the mud puddles and throwing rocks into them here as well. There was a good visitor's center to walk though, and my girls liked hearing about how Mt. Rainier is a volcano. They didn't quite believe me at first when I told them it was, because they didn't see any lava. 

Ah, cousins. My kids miss their cousins. Hopefully at some point we will not live so far away. 

 "Someday we will all be buff like Uncle Ryan!"

Other things we did: Trampoline jumping, tire swinging, sewing (mostly skirts), playing with the dogs, feeding cows, digging in the dirt, and watching movies the kids hadn't seen before. We just chilled, which is always nice coming from our busy life in California.