Mother's day

We had initially planned on going to Port Defiance Zoo for Mother's day, but as the day presented itself it seemed there were other things we could do and avoid the crowded expense.  The girls painted wonderful pictures on 5x7 gesso boards, Syliva is drawing in pencil and painting over the top, the fainted pencil lines under the washes of color are quite wonderful.  Ruth emulated the practice and got some good results.  Ruth and I picked some (peaked) lilacs and rodys for a flower arrangement and made a big breakfast for everyone.

I had been promising S I would take her swimming forever and just hadn't been able to squeeze in a trip to the Valley.  I promised her on Saturday I would take her on Sunday.  As we're getting ready Ruth pipes up that "I want to go to the Valley" and Earlene wanted to go too, so we all gathered up and headed out to the pool.

Sylvia is quite confident in the deep end of the family pool.  She hadn't swam in a while so she was pretty comfortable with some flotation devices to help her, I encouraged her to do a couple laps just to keep conditioned and she did really well.  Ruthie just LOVES the water and was climbing out of the pool and jumping back in to the water in to our open arms and then climbing out again.  I got her to puff out her cheeks and hold her breath and she got he hang of it.  She thrashes about in the water swimming, she's very comfortable in the water.  Both of them could be in the pool all day long.  I bribed them out with poptarts and we headed out.  Earlene drove us to the Tumwater Falls park by the brewery and we walked down the whole trail to the "big waterfall" at the end.  Earlene rescued some little fellow who had wandered off from his family.  Little crew-cutted two year old toddling to the brink of the canyon to the rapids, she scooped him up until his father came running back up the trail to claim him.  As we were leaving we saw him running around again trying to find the little guy.

On the north trail headed back to the parking area we stopped a watched two seagulls standing on a rock in the swiftly moving Descutes.  They were fishing for little frye coming down the rapids, every few seconds they would dive down in to the foaming water and grab a wriggling fish.  I had never actually seen gulls fish like that, they were really interesting.  We figured their eyesight must be pretty amazing to see pale slivers of fish in the churning water.