More fun in the snow!

Wow - this is surely a record for Portland, Oregon. It has actually snowed for 8 days in a row! By now we have about 9 inches on the ground, and it has drifted up to 14" in some places. Stanley went out in the snow today, but since he still has no coat, he didn't stay out long. You can see he nearly got buried in a drift, but Stanley smiled through it all. That kid has quite the positive outlook on life!

He also really enjoyed Christmas caroling around the neighborhood tonight. We have a tradition at our house to go around the neighborhood each year and sing to the neighbors with a group of friends. Our group was small this year, but our singing was quite excellent! Hope you're enjoying a break from school. Stanley likes having time off. He's hoping to get a little something under the tree on the 25th, and he's been a pretty good boy, so maybe we can arrange that!

Happy holidays!

Holy cow, it's snowing in Portland!!!

This has been a really great day because it's been snowing all day and that hardly ever happens in Portland. Portland's got a very mild climate, and we might have snow one or two days each winter. Whenever it snows, everything stops because we don't have many snow plows here and we have a LOT of big hills, so no one can go anywhere. I never want to go anywhere except my neighborhood when it's snowing anyway, because I just want to walk around and look at how pretty everything is! Of course I have to take a lot of pictures of everything, too. Stanley went out with us this morning, and I feel kind of bad because he didn't even have a hat or gloves or anything on, but he seemed to do just fine. Here are some pictures from our walk.


These are our friends Sylvie and Ruben. They were out sledding today and had a great time in the snow!
This is Jeff and Stanley in front of our house. I thought you might like to see what our house looks like...normally there's no snow in the yard :)

It's kind of hard to see in this picture, but that white dot in front of Stanley's head is a perfect, single snowflake. It was quite incredible! If you want to see some amazing snowflake photos, go to THIS site. The photos on this site were done by Wilson Bentley who was the first person to photograph a snowflake. And it's hard to believe, but he did it in 1885!!! There is a fun snowflake matching game on that site, too. If you want to make virtual paper snowflakes (on the computer, not with real paper), try THIS site. My students love to play on this site. You can make some really incredible designs!

Here Stanley was enjoying a beautiful holly tree! Luckily, it wasn't too pokey.
Here is Stanley making a snow angel in the snow just before we went inside to have hot chocolate with whipped cream. Mmmmmm. Nothing better than a snow day!

And we just got the BEST news and that is that there's not going to be any school tomorrow! Hooray - another day to play in the snow!!!

Have a good week at school. WORK hard and learn lots!

Birthdays, bowling and bunco

Stanley had a great week last week. It took him a little while to recover from that exciting trip to DC, so he didn't do much for a week or so, but believe me, he has been making up for lost time since then!!!

Last week I (Auntie Erin) had a pretty big week, too, because it was my 43rd birthday on December 7th! We had a really fun time celebrating. Here's what we did...

This is the Rollin' Heads Underdog Sports bowling team that we bowl with. We are currently in fourth place in our league, and we're pretty excited because we're going to the playoffs next week. We're pretty sure we're going to win. We did last year! This week the whole team dressed up in a Hawaiian theme. We all wore leis and tropical shirts or sarongs or, in my case, a grass skirt (not real, of course).
Even our mascot, Max the bowling pin (a REAL bowling pin), dressed up in tropical attire. You can see what some of our other costumes were in other weeks as well if you look carefully at Max. One week was cape week, and can you guess what the other week was?? If you guessed fake mustache week, you're right! Do you like Stanley's fancy Hawaiian shirt? He thought he was pretty cool with that on! he also had a flower decoration that went around his waist, but it's not exactly his size, so it sort of covers up his pants. He's still wearing those pants with a darn hole in them!

This is me with my great cake Uncle Jeff baked for me. It was Turtle Brownies. YUMMMM! Stanley really enjoyed the brownies :)

Stanley also got to go to bunco later in the week. Bunco is a dice game, and it's really fun. Some of your moms might play bunco - and maybe you've even played. Stanley was pretty good at bunco, but what he really liked was the White Elephant gift exchange after we finished playing bunco.
Here's one of Stanley's throws of the dice. Since it was on TWOs, he did pretty well, and he got to roll again!

One of the white elephant gifts Stanley particularly liked was this multi spouted teapot from The Nutcracker.
He also really liked the Cahrlie Brown Christmas tree and this scary guy from Monsters, Inc. Isn't his name Mikey or something?

Well, that's it for Stanley's exciting week. Hope you're having a good week at school. WORK hard and learn lots!

Stanley's big vacation!

Over Thanksgiving Stanley went to Washington, DC, with his swell new friends, Melissa and Neal, and he had a ball, although it was quite cold! Here are some pics from his trip!


Stanley was really excited to see the White House where the President gets to live. Did you know there's even a bowling alley in the White house?

Stanley also got to spend some time at the Air and space Museum.  A really great thing about the museums in Washington, DC, is that nearly all of them are free.  The Air and Space Museum has information about all kinds of flying things! There are exhibits about the first flights of the  Wright Brothers all the way to space exploration.  If you want to learn more about this museum, you can go to this link!

Stanley got to see two of Washington's famous buildings here. The tall skinny one is the Washington Monument. It's shaped like an obelisk and stands 555’ 5 1/8” tall. No building in DC is allowed to be taller than this monument. You can see for thirty miles on a clear day from the Washington Monument! Want to learn more? Click here!

Stanley also got to go to the National Zoo while he was in DC, and can you believe it, he got to see a real, live PANDA!!! I am certainly jealous of this. Once when I went to DC I went to the zoo to try and see the pandas, but no luck. Stanley for sure got lucky. He also got to see the elephants and lots of other animals. Here in Portland we have a new baby elephant at our zoo! Stanley said he really liked the zoo, so maybe over winter break we'll go up to the Oregon Zoo and check it out...but we will for sure not see any pandas! You can learn all kinds of things about the animals at the National Zoo on their fantastic website.

Just as Stanley was about to finish his sightseeing in DC, he had the startling discovery that there are other Stanleys out there! It was so exciting to meet this other Stanley who was visiting from San Francisco! both of them really liked the Merry-Go-Round.

Stanley wants to say a BIG thanks to Melissa and Neal for taking him on such an exciting vacation. He'll be back soon with pictures from Erin's birthday and bowling league - the theme was tropical, and he got a new shirt for the party! He looked quite spiffy!

Have a good week at school! WORK hard and learn lots!

Exciting news!

There was some exciting news this week! Stanley, the lucky duck, got invited to go to Washington, DC with our friends Melissa and Neil for Thanksgiving. After all that hard work on the basement, we decided he definitely earned a vacation, so yesterday he got on the plane. We're looking forward to seeing and hearing all about his adventures in Washington, DC.

I heard you all are expecting some exciting news from Ms. Work, too. Someone needs to tell me when that baby arrives! Congratulations, Ms. Work!

We'll let you know how DC was next week.

Making a new basment

Well, Stanley has never worked so hard in his life as he has this last few weeks in our basement. He's a very hard worker! We used to have an ugly old basement, but for two weeks we've been cleaning, hammering, painting and working our tails off sprucing the place up, and now it is almost finished. We've taken a yucky old basement and made it into a great place for watching movies (we don't really watch much TV in our house, but we do watch movies and sometimes sports) and playing games. It's mostly decorated in the colors of the Chicago Cubs because that's Jeff's favorite team. I was hoping to add some pictures here, but Blogger seems to be having some trouble tonight, so maybe I'll be able to add those later. In the meantime, we'll be downstairs relaxing!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Enjoy your vacation!

Update 11-23: The pictures feature is working again - yipee! Check out our cool new space! Here's what it looked like when we started:














Now it looks like this!

We went to a play!

I haven't given you an update in a while, and I'm sorry for that because Stanley has been quite busy. I did see that several of you made comments on one of the recent posts, and that was really fun for Stanley. He is so happy that you're reading about his adventures all the way from Ohio!

Many of you asked about Stanley going trick-or-treating and his costume, but unfortunately Stanley didn't get to go trick-or-treating because we were up at the mountain and there weren't any other houses around. Maybe he can go next year! We didn't carve a pumpkin either, even though we went to the pumpkin patch. Since we weren't home for Halloween, we wanted to be able to enjoy our pumpkin for a little longer, so it's still sitting on our porch, uncarved.

I liked the comment about the bee's nest looking like a burnt marshmallow. Nice imagination!

So back to what Stanley's been up to. The otehr weekend, Max and Elizabeth were in a play and Stanley got to go with us to watch. There was singing and dancing, card tricks and generally quite a lot of fun. The play was an adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin. The kids did a fabulous job.

Elizabeth was a wizard and Max was a gnome.

If you don't know the story, you can read it here.

I hope you're having a great week at school. WORK hard and learn lots!