Whale Watching

My parents came out for a visit in Seattle here in July.  One of the coolest things at this time of year is to head north a bit to check out the local Orca whales.  Before when we did it, we were able to watch from shore, but this time we booked a whole cruise to see them.

Emma and the Creepy Hour - Ella's First Book

As part of Ella's 2nd grade writing curriculum, all of the students wrote a short story.  Ella really got into it and wrote quite the little piece, complete with illustrations and everything.  Click on Read More to see Ella's manuscript completely unedited.  I should turn it into a real book on one of those websites, but I need her to redo all of the illustrations for it.

Here is the description that she wrote for the back of the book to prime you up for it.

A creepy case is on the chase!

A girl named Emma has dog she lets her brother borrow the dog.  The brother does something bad.  Will they find the dog?

Max's First Baseball Season

Max wrapped up his first season of t-ball just a couple of weeks ago, playing for the Marlins.  He really enjoyed playing here, and we had a pretty good spring and were not rained out too often.  It was a bit cold for a few games, but playable.

Hawaii Vacation at Aulani

We recently got back from our Spring vacation to Hawaii, which in the words of Max, was epic.  Plenty of words and photos below.  Why was it so good?  Because it was the perfect Wynn vacation, no plans, no agendas, just lazing around in a beautiful place having a great time.

We headed to Disney's new resort on Oahu, Aulani, which just opened recently, for Ella's birthday.  We moved our trip back a couple of weeks because we had a whole bunch of friends coming to see us just after Ella's birthday.  We always go to Disney World for Max's birthday, so for our spring vacation we thought that it would be nice to go somewhere for Ella.  And Aulani just opened and is one of the Disney Vacation Club resorts (we actually own part of Aulani), plus it is pretty easy to get to Hawaii from Seattle, so it seemed like a grand plan.

In and around Seattle

We just got done with a whole host of visitors that stayed with us for awhile.  Sarah's parents came out a few weeks back to visit because we had a whole group of people from Brazil coming as well.  The whole Butler clan still has a lot of friends down in Brazil from their time there.  One of the families that they were very good friends with have had a couple of opportunities to come visit and were able to make a trip here in April to come see the States.  So we had a family of 4, Tainah, Gildo, and their 2 boys (3 and 4 months) along with Tainah's parents Milton and Marcia.  Then all 4 of us plus Joe and DiAnne and we had one full household, 12 people in total, was quite the scene.

With everyone here we were able to get out and about a bit to see some things in Seattle.  The first thing that we did was get out to the Tulip Festival.  This is an annual event where a Dutch immigrant starting growing tons of tulips here many years ago.  So now they figured out how to really cash in and get people to drive several hours to see the Tulips.  Was pretty cool though.