Bryn, Paul & Sophia's Blog: October 2008

Last Saturday Sophia and Paul carved our pumpkin. She didn't do much carving, but helped

design it at least.

Sophia and I had an adventure these week. We took the train and a bus to Richmond, British Columbia (Canada) to visit our cousins Carrie and Jeff. Carrie came to visit in January and ever since Sophia has called our guest bedroom "Carrie's room" and the guest towels "Carrie's towels" sometimes protesting when others used them. I intended that Sophia and I would go to visit her earlier in the years, but minor things like surgery got in the way.

Since I wasn't quite brave enough to drive up there with just Sophia we took the tr

ain to Seattle and then had to take a bus to Canada. Sophia really liked the train and seemed to like the bus more than a car, but not by a whole lot. On both, though, I could do more to keep her entertained than I could have in a car, and I got to see the scenery too.

Carrie is one of those people for me who I can not see in quite a while and it feels like no time has actually passed, so although it's been several months, and had been years before that, we just picked things up where we left off. She was great at

finding things for us to do, and Sophia enjoyed all the extra attention. We went to parks almost every day, a

pumpkin patch, swimming and to an indoor play time at the local community center. Since it's Canada, they actually put money into things like parks and community centers so those facilities were quite a cut above what we'd find here. The swimming

pool was fantastic because it was only about 2.5 feet at the shallow end and only about 4

feet deep at the deep end, so with a flotation belt on, Sophia was able to move around on her own. She really enjoyed that. When traveling with a two-year-old you don't have take her to major tourist sites; she's perfectly happy with going to a park every day.

The one major thing we did was go to a pumpkin patch. It was Sophia's 3rd of the year. This

one was quite impressive. They had live music with a dancing pumpkin and corn, and large hay rides which had musicians/singers on them. Sophia was a bit intimidated by the large dancing vegetables, but seemed to love the rest of it.

Sophia really loved the room she stayed in. Carrie introduced it to her as a "princess room" and from there Sophia was hooked. It

also had a door in the closet into the next room, and Sophia could entertain herself for quite a while running through the door and around. There were also 2 sets of stairs and she wanted to pick which one we used each time.

Jeff works long hours so we didn't see too much of him. Sophia did find him hysterical and would giggle every time she looked at him. Of course, he may have been making funny faces, I'm not sure. We didn't get a picture of me the entire week, which ok with me since Sophia is cuter than I am.

At the train station in Seattle, a man waiting for our train felt the need to display his religious opinion. Different from

most people like this, he actually didn't try to talk to anybody about it, so that was ok

with me.

I'm not doing such a good job of

updating the blog anymore. Complaints are coming from various family members, but I guess I'm not finding this as fun as I once did.

2 weeks ago my father spent the weekend with us and we took our annual trip to the pumpkin patch. We couldn't have asked for better weather; it was high 60's and bright and sunny - not exactly typical

Oregon weather in October. We had lots of fun and took many pictures. One of the pictures we took in front of the llama pen and one very pushy llama posed with us. Later, when feeding the animals, the same llama tried to get all the food. Sophia was supposed to feed the animals, but she chickened out so I got to.