Life is Good, Day 1

The first day of the Life is Good conference was also my birthday, so we had a mix of being there and connecting with all the other families and finding out all the fun stuff there was to do at the hotel and of escaping to the outside world be with our little family to check out nearby food and fun.

We started with the latter, at a local coffee shop called Brewed.

Brewed was happy to adhere to Otto's breakfast motto: different foods must not touch.

Martin and I can highly recommend the fritatta sandwich. 

Otto proceeded to win several rounds of Connect 4 against Papa, which made everyone laugh.

The view from above.

We chatted up one of the owners and learned about their wine and beer, in addition to their coffee.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped to look in the windows of a glass blowing studio. We watched the artists work for a while before the waved us inside.

We asked lots of questions about what they were doing, and they asked us a lot of questions about what we were doing. They were very interested to learn it was an unschooling conference, since all three of them had young children and were starting to think about school choices.

We watched them work for about 45 minutes, and by the end of our time there, they were all very interested to check out unschooling, and we have a name and a glass blowing studio to visit in Chicago.

Back at the hotel...

The boys set up their animation DVD and chicken button shop.

Gillian and Effie.

Customers.

We attended the Life is Good Film Festival, which included two Max and Otto movies. There were some really good ones, and an especially impressive Star Wars Lego animation that got us all inspired. We hooked up with Aidan, another Lego stop motion animator, and the boys exchanged all sorts of information. Turns out Aidan is leading a Funshop tomorrow on Lego animation (we had already planned to attend but didn't realize who would be leading it). It was good for them all to make that connection so quickly.

We went out for a nice birthday dinner at The Little Pine Tree, a Korean American restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. It was a really lovely place, and such a good place to be on a cold rainy evening. They brought us tea as soon as we sat down, which warmed us all up.

There was some confusion, and we ended up getting the two dinners from the neighboring table in addition to the three dinners we had ordered. The owners let us keep all of them, so we had several fairly full boxes of food to bring back to the hotel with us when we returned. Excellent for sharing with other unschooling families (especially those with hungry teenagers).

Finished off with cinnamon tea.

Back at the hotel, it was time for the Music Fest. We stopped in to hear Carolyn and Bret sing a few songs and stayed to hear several more songs from other very talented musicians. Max took in the room and crowd, which is the same place where the talent show will be tomorrow night...it is a bit bigger than he expected.

We came back to the room to spend the last bit of my birthday with just our little family, drink the last of our champagne, and learn the sad news that our chicken Junior is probably in her final hours (we had been in contact on and off with our neighbors throughout the day, but despite all they were trying to do for her, things are looking very bad). We had toasted her at dinner, and now we spent some time together, taking in the news. Kind of a sad end to a nice day, but it was good to be together and to once again think about how much wonderful is in our lives.

Here Comes the Rain Again

After a bit of sun, the rain is back, and I guess it really feels like Portland. We moved our base camp across the river to Vancouver, where it is still raining (if not more so). So we said our goodbyes to The Park Lane Suites and Ken's Artisan Bakery, both of whom have served us so well on our visit.

Effie and I went on an excursion to Urban Outfitters, where she tried on some things that looked adorable on her, but she ultimately didn't go for any of them. Still, it was fun to have some Effie time.

We still have big plans for one of these some day.

Portland, Day 4

We had another breakfast adventure, but this one wasn't as successful as yesterday's. In fact it was downright surreal. But we lived to tell the tale. 

There was not room for all of us at one table, so I got a table all to myself.

Otto didn't remember riding the tram the last time we were in Portland, so it was high on his to-do list. 

It was a rainy, dreary day. We thought it would be good to spend it in a museum, but a lot of indecision on all our parts led to us walking away from the admissions desk at the Portland Art Museum. At least we got to pose by a dog sculpture.

And we got to see this cool installation in progress: those are all bike helmets, not bowling balls, as we originally guessed.

We headed back to the hotel neighborhood to try to hook up with our friends. We had a really hard time getting all in synch, and I am sad to report that we were hardly ever all eight ready for the same event at the same time, which made it a bit tricky. But six of us went to do retail therapy. 

Fergus and Otto were walking arm in arm, and Fergus noted their similar orange coats. Then we noticed Max and Craig were matchy matchy too, although in blue.

Our family went to Exit Real World Skate Shop three times on our Portland visit. The boys got cool canvas shoes, Martin got a new coat, and Max and Otto tried out the skateboards, progressively getting more interested in them on each visit. The guy helping us was so nice and informative that we were really tempted to get one as a souvenir. But then we remembered we are also carrying a banjo and a ukulele, several puppets, a bag of electronics, two bags of toys, and three stuffed suitcases, and we decided to hold off on that purchase.

We had to make up for our really bad breakfast and somewhat frustrating day (we were all feeling tired and cranky and not really having the fun we had hoped to have, there were several meltdowns, from all ages), so we headed off to Papa Haydn's for dinner and dessert. Amazing what a delicious meal will do for all of our moods. It was the right place to be when you felt chilled to the bone.

Refusing to accept the sad truth that we could hardly manage a successful outing with our entire party for most of the Portland trip, we made one last attempt to have a big adventure with our friends. The boys actually thought of it over our dinner. They remembered how fun our VooDoo Doughnut experience had been and hoped Fergus would want to share it. Martin agreed they were pretty much the best doughnuts he could recall ever eating, which sealed the deal that we would like more of them. 

In the end, we did not manage to get us all out together, but 5 of the 8 of us had an adventure, and came back excited to relive the details and share the bounty.

And hey, now we've got a photo of the sign in the night time.

Back at the hotel.

And now we are off to Vancouver for more adventures!

Portland, Day 3

Breakfast at Cafe Bijou did not disappoint.

As we were walking toward breakfast, we kept seeing people with these big pink boxes, and the closer we got, the more of these boxes we saw. Turns out Voodoo Doughnut was right around the corner from Cafe Bijou. Even though the line was intimidating, we decided to jump in for fun.

Thirty minutes later, we were in.

And got our own pink box. With voodoo dolls.

And more.

We walked to the river with our big box.

We met up with Fergus and Effie and Craig and Gillian and headed to a wonderful park, where we played in the fountain, ate doughnuts and enjoyed the sun.

Self portrait at Smokehouse 21.

Effie stares down a plate of ribs.