the.amanda.sewell

Sometimes life gets super busy when you are a mom of four, with driving kids where they need to be, to organizing and cleaning and sorting out our life, but I managed to make some time to slip away with Dahlia for a bit and see some gorgeous flowers. It is one of the things I LOVE about living here in Oregon, that and the berries 😋

It has been a long time since I have blogged.  I got distracted with all kinds of things, one of which was I could not decide if I wanted to pay blogger to host more pictures here on my blog.  I love taking lots of pictures and was trying to decide if I wanted to keep blogging or just let it go.  In the end, I decided I miss my blog.  It is fun for me to go back and read through and see all of the things I have created/done.  SO, I'm back!! (said in my most creeper voice).   This weekend I got to go see Death Cab for Cutie.  I had not been to a show in awhile and it was so fun to relax and dance and sing and just be not a mommy for a few minutes.  Sometimes I get so overwhelmed with all the mommy chores I have to do that I forget who I am.  They played the entire Transatlanticism album (they are only doing this in two venues so it was pretty sweet) and then they played a few other songs which they called "part II."  I was impressed with how much they sounded exactly

 As one of our summer activities, I knew I wanted to take the kids to the coast and we decided on Newport because it had the aquarium, and poor E has been going through aquarium withdrawals.  We totally miss going to SeaLife in AZ together and seeing all the fishies.  It was our happy place to mellow out.  I had all these plans of doing activities (pulled taffy, aquarium port holes craft, tissue paper fishes) with the kids during the week leading up to the trip, but being a faker single mom is exhausting (seriously, don't know how real single mommies do it and work) and those SO did not happen *sigh*  Maybe next time.  I really wanted to make pulled taffy with the kids. First stop . . . the beach.  Kids were really excited to get to use their sand toys in sand.  I was really excited to listen to the soothing sounds of the ocean and take some pictures.  Hubs was still working, so he worked on scouting out a spot that his web access would still work, and then finally gave

We had planned to go to Sedona this weekend, but we woke up and had a slow breakfast, and when I looked online, I discovered that the leaves were not changing as much as I had hoped they would be, so we decided to wait a couple weekends.  We went through our list of stuff to do while still in AZ, and decided upon the Space Center.   The drive was only about an hour.  We ended up getting there close to 1pm.  The museum closed at 4.  We started our adventure with their liquid nitrogen demonstration.  It was really cool.  The kids really enjoyed it!  Afterwards, we went on a tour of the facilities.  We learned about all kinds of astronauts and attempts to go into space.  We got to see the tire of a space shuttle after it had been used up (apparently they can only be used twice).  The kids got to see a small collection of meteorites and even got to hold one (and they were surprisingly more heavy than we expected). It was an interesting museum.  I thought it was a bit overpriced fo

When I heard Weezer would be at the Arizona State Fair, I knew I had to be there!  The last time Weezer was coming to AZ, their tour bus got in a wreck and they had to cancel the show. Our family had never been to the state fair.  We got a sitter for the younger two and took Em and J to their first concert ever.  Em was really excited, J was more excited about the rides than he was to go to the show. We got there about an hour before the doors opened.  Em and J did the read and ride program.  You read three books and write a summary of about 25 words about each one, then you turn it in at the guest services booth and they gave us these awesome ride tickets worth three rides, any three rides, regardless of ticket amount.  We figure it saved us about $30, well worth doing.  It was enough rides that it made the fair fun for the kids.  We did not buy any tickets.  We did two rides before the show and one afterward.  The only thing we wanted to do, but didn't, was the zip lin