Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

I've never been to the Tulip Festival before today. Partly because this year is the first year we could travel for an hour in the car without someone howling on the way there, or taking an inopportune nap. You know, the kind where your kid falls asleep 2 hours before bedtime. Here we are in the car:

And I'll give you a preview of where we are going to end up. It's not what I expected.

Yup.

Anyway, the Tulip Festival was beautiful. We kept finding new favorites, after thinking we had found our favorite already.

The river of grape hyacinths:

 These two get along so well, it amazes me.

And then we had a picnic snack, and felt refueled:

Aspen surprises me these days with her sudden and unexpected stillness. It never lasts long, but is striking in that she has been still so rarely.

If you're curious, she was trying to escape the camera. We were essentially playing tag/hide and seek, but with the camera.

 I'm losing, and I know it. Mom, 0: Kids, 1

And then we went to the tulip fields…

 We made a very brief effort to keep them out of the puddles, but quickly saw they were going to win again. Mom, 0: Kids, 2. We've learned to pick our battles, and make them things we really care about. Keeping the kids clean and dry were not high on our list today.

 Aspen's favorite things to play with are always from nature. She could be perfectly happy living in the middle of the forest with no toys, I'm sure of it.

On our way out to the car to dry off and change into whatever clothes we had available. And blankets. They both went home snuggled up in their current favorite blankets.

Mud.

Pumpkin "Muffins"

Sorry y'all, there are no photos to go with this, but there is a delicious, whole foods muffin recipe, so you should read on anyway.

I made this yesterday to take to brunch with some good friends, and the kids ate 2 each on the way there.  And then another 2 throughout the day.  Do you know why that was okay with me? Because it's basically oatmeal.

It was all gobbled up yesterday, so today I made more, with a couple changes. Here's your recipe:

Pumpkin "Muffins"
Makes about 20 muffins

1 1/4 cup steel cut oats
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup quinoa
1 T coconut oil or butter

2 t pumpkin pie spice
1/2 t sea salt
1 cup hot water

3 eggs
1 cup pumpkin puree
2 cups milk
1/3 cup pure maple syrup

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees, and grease some muffin tins.

Melt the butter in a small pot, and toast all the grains for about 3 minutes (till they smell toasty).
Add the sea salt and spices and mix well.  Pour hot water over the dry ingredients and set aside.

Whisk eggs, pumpkin, milk and maple syrup together until smooth.  Pour the grains into the wet ingredients, and give a good stir. It will look VERY wet, but it should work.
Ladle into greased muffin cups.  Unless you try very hard, some will have more grains, and others more pumpkin "soup", but they will both come out fine.  The more soupy muffins will have more of a pumpkin pie texture on top.

Bake for 45 minutes or until set.

Here's the true joy (for me) in this recipe: it's super flexible.  Yesterday I made it with half steel cut oats, half rolled oats (no quinoa), and it was great, a little fluffier than today's version. You could replace the maple syrup with sugar, and increase the milk or water by 1/3 cup. You could also scale the sugar back (when I was looking for inspiration, I saw some baked pumpkin oatmeal recipes with no sugar, but I like a little sweetness.  You could try it, and let me know how it went.).  You could probably even reduce the number of eggs.  If you wanted to skip the muffin tins, you could make 2 pumpkin loaves out of this.

Nutritional info (using whole milk):
78 calories, 11g carbs, 3g fat, 3g protein, 6g sugar

A change in perspective

A few weeks ago I got an email from my friends saying they were selling their canoe and car.  Bubba and I usually check in with each other about big purchases, but I wanted that canoe!  I could see big adventures, and I jumped at it.  Bubba was skeptical at first, but over the past few weeks has gotten really excited.

(As an aside, this is one of the reasons we're so good together-I get excited about a new idea, and he is skeptical.  He either talks me out of doing something really off the wall or really big, or we start something really fun or really big.  My excitements are not usually small.  For example, buying a canoe.  Or a business.)

But then we brought the canoe home, and the first thing he does is see if he can haul it with his bike.  And, yes, he can.  Not well, however.  He will no doubt be refining his system.

How is he the sensible one???

And then we had to be patient, since he went back to work, but finally today we tried out our new canoe.  And thank goodness!  We had a crappy night last night, and were in crappy moods this morning, and then we started loading the canoe.  Onto the car.

We drove to a put in at the Fremont Canal literally a 3 minute drive from our house.  We got onto the water, and forgot all about our tired crappiness.  Because how awesome is this?

And how often do you see the Ballard Bridge from down here?

Usually I'm up top trying to relax because there's nothing I can do about being late and stuck in traffic while the bridge is up.  

Taking a running break

Snacktime for these hungry ones

Getting more comfortable

Getting a little too comfortable (at times)

Back on land

I thought we'd be out for an hour or two, but by the time we got back, it was 4 hours, and 4 happy moods later.  And to top it off, on the way home, really, in the 3 minutes we spent in the car, Aspen asked why we drove since we weren't going very far.  I think that might have been the highlight of Bubba's day.