Category: The Seattle Times

Rite of passage: Maid of the Mist. It felt like going to a spray park, on a boat!

Goodbye, Mount Rainier! We’re back East for a few weeks to do some long-delayed catching up. Backyard fun with cousins. We waited three years for this!!

The boys helped make a cake to celebrate THIS MANY trips around the sun. Every year, Ikea sends me a birthday present. Last year, it was a bathmat. This year, I got a vase. Being a grown-up seems so much more exciting when you’re little.

The yummiest veggies are the ones grown in our backyard.

Beautiful day for a Bainbridge Island adventure. Playgrounds and beach time, and the prettiest ferry ride ever. Within 20 minute at Fay Bainbridge, a bald eagle flew by, then an osprey and a great blue heron.

The new Mercerdale playground on Mercer Island was so much fun. Highlight was a big train you can climb on. The ground was so cushy it was almost springy. We didn’t last too long in the sun, however, and went to cool off at the Crossroads spray park.

Beautiful Kubota Garden. This 20-acre Japanese-inspired garden is run as a city park, open daily, with free admission and free parking.

Hazel Miller Park in Edmonds has this giant green bucket that tips over when it’s full and the kids go CRAZY. There’s also a gentler water side for the not-so-adventurous, and a terrific play fort next to the spray park. We picked up takeout from Seattle Deli (10 minutes away) to make it a perfect…

We picked up yummy pastries from Bakery Nouveau to eat the the park, but our picnic was cut short by a squirrel that WOULD NOT leave us alone. They must as smelled as irresistible to the squirrel as they did to us. From left: twice baked chocolate croissant, blueberry and ginger scone, butter croissant.

Our favorite thing to do is going to playgrounds, and I wrote about four new neighborhood gems for The Seattle Times. 1. Westside Park was the first of a 5-playground crawl in Redmond. Five playgrounds in one afternoon, phew! After Westside Park, we hit the three at Marymoor Park and one at Grass Lawn Park.…