Hello, Seattle.

Nils had an SEO conference in Seattle at the end of July. While Seattle isn't a destination I've ever pined for, we thought it might be fun to make a family trip out of it. That is one stinkin' long drive, but we split the 14 hours into two days, and the kids were troopers for the most part. We arrived on a Monday night.

Tuesday, we drove to Port Hadlock, which is about 2 1/2 hours around the Puget Sound from Seattle (right by Forks, for all of you vampire peeps), and visited Nils' grandparents. He had met them once in his life when he was a teenager. They were very happy to see us. His grandmother started writing us letters when we got married, and Nils has been good to keep in pretty regular contact with her through the years. We spent the whole day at their house visiting with them and getting to know them. It was a nice day.

Wednesday-Friday Nils was at his conference all day, so I was on my own with the kiddies. The hotel we stayed at was in the heart of downtown Seattle. It sounded great at first, but we quickly learned that downtown Seattle, and perhaps downtown in any big city, is not conducive to small kids. So not only were we a circus side-show with all of our offspring, but there aren't any places to take kids to eat. Everything is upscale and classy, which we as a whole...are not. We managed to find a Trader Joe's, and bought enough food to pack for lunches and bought cereal and milk for breakfast. The kids ate their cereal out of the hotel cups every morning. Yeah, baby, that's classy right there.

Fremont Troll coolness.

We did some fun things. We went to the Seattle Children's Museum, spent a whole day there and everyone had a ball. My favorite part was the lady who was teaching her 18-month old son about organic composting. "We don't use fertilizer in compost, because that means it's not organic, and that's a no-no!" The kid responded, "Blah, blah, goo goo!" I felt that I had experienced a true Seattle moment right there. Tender. The next day we went to the Fremont Troll and the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, which were both free activities. I enjoyed that very much.

On our last day the kids and I walked down to Pike Place, where again, we were a side-show attraction. People kept looking at each other and pointing at me. Anders asked why so many people were looking at us. Because they're not used to seeing...um, children, honey. Anyway, Pike Place is a madhouse, and not conducive to a side-by-side double stroller. We eventually found a pasta bar, where I bought the kids a plate of fettuccine to share. After they slicked it clean, the guy running the place said, "Hey! Gimme your plate!" Then he filled it up with more noodles and said, "You gotta lotta kids! Everytime I look up there's another kid there!" I ate a little side Caesar salad, and when we finished I wanted to take the kids down to the Olympic Sculpture Park. It was about a mile away from Pike Place, and I thought it would be a place where the kids could run around and play and climb and do other things that children generally like doing.

I started feeling sick to my stomach a few minutes into our walk. And, as it turns out, the Olympic Sculpture Park is essentially an outdoor museum where adults go to have reverence for art, look out over the Sound, and feel serenity. Addie peed her pants while we were there. Aani dumped out a bag of popcorn on the pathway, which just seemed so inappropriate at an outdoor museum. At this point I knew that vomiting was imminent for me, but felt we had defiled this place enough and we left. As we were trudging on back, I kept scoping out places to barf. There is no respectable place to barf in downtown Seattle. And as if I didn't look weird enough, what with all those kids and all, puking in a gutter probably wouldn't help people think much kinder of me. Honestly, I didn't think I was going to make it. I felt awful, and still had a long, uphill, double stroller-pushing walk back to the hotel. We stopped in a parking lot, and I said a prayer. I explained to Heavenly Father that if I was going to puke, please help me to puke now, or help me to feel better so that I could make it back to the hotel. Well, I didn't throw up in that parking lot, but my prayer was answered. I started feeling better and made it back to the hotel in a few minutes, where I could be sick in peace. And sick, sick I was. But, I was thankful for that answer to my prayer.

In the hotel lobby as we were checking out. Everyone was jammied up and ready to drive into the night. We were a  spectacle.

Nils got done with his conference that night, and about 3 minutes after he walked in the door, we decided to get the heck outta there. We were supposed to leave Saturday morning, but decided we'd be better off driving as long as we could that night and getting home Saturday night rather than Sunday. That's what we did, and it worked out splendidly. Goodbye, Seattle!

In review: I'd go to Seattle again if we stayed in a house somewhere besides downtown, where we could cook our own food and have lots of room to do our thang. Anders keeps saying that he's sick of hotels and is in no hurry to go on a trip again. I guess they didn't like sleeping horizontally on that double-bed?