Mini Vacation

We took off on Friday morning (ok, late morning) to head to the Oregon Coast. We ended up in Reedsport which is the southern part of the coast - somewhere we had never been before. Got a little hotel room there - it was about 7pm. We had some yummy seafood and then headed back to the hotel for some swimming. It was a fun trip over and evening as well. Jason and I left the kids in the hotel room for like 5 minutes just to run downstairs and get them a candy bar in the lobby. We came back to the hotel phone ringing...and I knew just what it was. Apparently the kids had been jumping from bed to bed (and I'm guessing landing on the floor in between)...we had a noise complaint from below. So Jason told them that the hotel was going to call the police if they acted up any more and that seemed to take care of it. It was hilarious though...I guess 3 kids can get into trouble pretty quickly...especially when they are as excited as they were.

Next morning we headed up the coast, stopped at "Winchester Bay" for a minute and eventually ended up in Newport. We grabbed a hotel room there and then headed down to the beach for some fun. Here are some pics of our adventure:

The beautiful Oregon coast...
Alex...

Kira doing cartwheels...

Digging in the sand with dad...

The baby....

Sand art by the kids..

Lauren drawing "Eve" from Wall-e...such a cute movie!

Sand sculpture by dad...the kids helped by adding the nose hair.

We also found some sea creatures on our adventure...some of which just had to make the trip home with us...a few sand crabs and clams (not pictured).

The crab in the red bucket is "cheetoh" as named by Kira...he was not feeling well when we got home so the kids were all worried that he was going to die.

The other crabs (horrible color, I know, but I still don't have my photo editing software loaded yet)...I think this is "pepsi" and the little guy on his head is "pringles".

I'm not sure these guys will last, but the kids are having fun with them for now.

We got home Sunday night at about 9pm - it was a great mini-vacation and we were all sad to leave.

We were really excited when we got home and found that our little spider charlotte had returned. If you remember from posts past, the story of our cat face spider family...this is the third generation "charlotte". You can see she is just a baby, but she had her little web spun and was quick to eat the tiny bug that Jason threw in her net.

We are hoping she will stick around for the summer, grow and have her babies here too. This all coming from the mom who hates spiders...but seriously, you have got to LOVE a spider who chooses to spend her life in your backyard and who's babies return to the same spot to live out their lives.

Oh, yes I almost forgot...on our way over to the coast we stopped to have a picnic at Belknap Hot Springs. There was a tiny little butterfly who was quite fond of Lauren...he landed on her finger and spent nearly the whole time there...it was pretty difficult to get him off when we were ready to leave. We'll call her the butterfly whisperer from now on.....