graduation

My little brothers graduated from high school this month. It was a little surreal. I sat on the hillside above the bandshell in Ashland's Lithia Park, watching my brothers in their red gowns graduate from my high school. Seventeen years later. Half my lifetime ago I took that same joyful walk down the path by the fountain, to take my seat for one of life's crystalline moments. Watching my brothers in that moment I was moved for many reasons, not just for my own nostalgia. My brothers overcame a lot during the past four years to get to this place, and to say I'm proud of them doesn't quite do justice to the feeling.

My family spent the weekend all together in our hometown. We brought our grandma down from Eugene, and Shep came too. We celebrated with my brothers, spent time with their girlfriends, saw family friends, and went on walks and rides in Nathan's 1956 jeep. We went out for ice cream, and just hung out together.

And then it was done. They threw their hats in the air, gave us all hugs, and walked off with their friends to stay up all night at the Senior party.

The day afterwards we went to Standing Stone for dinner because our mom used to love to sit there on the patio some weekday afternoons with her boys, my brothers. She would drink a pint of dark beer and they would eat french fries. We made a toast in her name, raising our glasses to her, and how proud she too would be of these sweet, smart boys who we have collectively raised.

rhododendrons and baby goats

It rained all spring. All spring.

We were the third stop on our good friends Kirsten and Ryan's rainy PNW roadtrip last month. Highlights of their visit included a soggy walk through the rhododendron garden at Hendricks Park...

...feeding baby goats at Lone Pine Farm during a brief moment of sunshine...
...the Camas Ridge Elementary School end of year carnival (maybe it convinced the Smiths not to have kids), waffles at Off the Waffle, and an aerobed in our livingroom for three days (we didn't mind, but I'm sure they were glad to get back to the privacy of their tent). The rain really thwarted our efforts to get them to move further west, but we had a great time anyway.

long weekend

It was a long lazy weekend here in Eugene.

Milo decided to spend memorial day weekend in Sunriver with his best friend Miles' family. It was the longest he had been away from all of us.

I let him pack by himself, and the only shoes he took for a sunny warm weekend were his bogg boots. (This photo sent via text, accompanied by a comment about his fashion sense...)

We missed Milo, but it was nice to spend time with our bookend children. We went for a lot of walks, did a lot of gardening, and watched a lot of movies after Lucy went to bed (Sherlock Holmes, which was almost over-stylized but immensely entertaining; The Invention of Lying, which I cannot recommend because I fell asleep in the first 10 minutes; and Iron Man 2, which Liam and Joel loved and I missed out on due to Lucy's nap schedule...)
I leave you with this picture of our "sprinting monster" as we shall call her for the time being. Lucy has entered a new realm of feisty of late. She is trying out having a mind of her own, which includes sprinting away from us at every opportunity: down the sidewalk, into the street, out of her room during a diaper change...