When bliss happens, take note

 

Life hasn't been easy lately. Our kids scream, bite, hit and generally act in loathsome ways way more than we'd like. We go from the grind of work to the grind of child care to housework to sleep and back again. So I really feel compelled to write when we have an amazing day like today, so we can remember it on less-than-amazing days.

First amazing thing is that Katy is here visiting. Hooray! We had a leisurely breakfast and then headed out to a stunningly, quintessentially Seattle place... Gasworks Park. It's an old decommissioned gas plant that's been turned into a city park, and the old gasworks equipment has been painted bright colors and left for kids to climb on. It's right by Lake Union, where all the houseboats are (where Tom Hanks supposedly lived in Sleepless in Seattle), so we could watch houseboats and sailboats and kayaks on the water,with the Space Needle and downtown skyline in the background. The sky was Santa Fe blue. Incredible! Then we treated ourselves to lunch at a burger place and went to check out the giant troll sculpture under a bridge in the Fremont neighborhood. The kids loved it so much they cried when we left.

After nap time and dinner time, we headed to Alki beach with watermelon, even though it's almost pitch dark out at 7 pm now. But it was such a lovely night... The kids had fun looking at stars and chasing each other, and we watched the ferries gliding across the sound, all lit up, with the silhouette of the Olympics in the distance. And here's the craziest thing. On the way back, as we walked up our alley, Katy spotted a flying farolito! It's basically a paper lantern with a candle inside that somehow lifts up into the air and floats until it burns itself up. Then we saw another and another! Someone must have been setting them off from the beach, but we were all enthralled, especially the kids. Ezra had just recently been talking about the flying farolito he saw in Santa Fe on Christmas Eve of 2010, when he was only 2 years, 5 months old.

It was a really magical end to a great day.