Life with the Conleys

In May, Josh and I celebrated our 10 year anniversary. We stayed in Vancouver B.C. for the night and Eli got a vacation with the Mason's. This was the first time we have left Eli for a night and were worried how he would do. Other than vomiting on the porch as we were dropping him off, there were no mishaps and he had a great time. Thanks Dan and Ashley for letting him stay with you! Our trip was delightful. We stayed in an apartment in downtown that we rented through Airbnb. It wasn't until after we paid for the rental that the owner disclosed that the building didn't allow short term rentals. The owner said if we were confronted by the leasing manager that we should tell him we were friends or relatives visiting from out of town and that he (the owner) was "a 30 year old white male. Make it work." Luckily, we didn't run into anyone as we were coming or going. Finding parking near the rental was troublesome. Not having GPS and a multitude of one-way stree...

Lately Eli has said some things that I have found to be particularly cute and want to remember. If I say "I love you to the moon and back" he will reply "I love you to the moon and front". Instead of saying upside-down he says upside-downside. Dinosaurs are often called dinosaurus.

Josh started a new job the second week of May. After four years at Getty Images, he has moved on to T-Mobile. He is working as a contractor for them, but the job has the potential to be contract to hire. He is still learning the ropes but so far it's going well. Josh had a few days between jobs and we took advantage of it by doing a hike to Barclay Lake. It is about 4.5 miles round trip to a nice lake at the base of Mount Baring. There were only a few other people on the trail, so we were able to enjoy some solitude. Trail running This is a pretty cool bridge Josh hid off the trail to "scare" us as we hiked by. Eli wanted a turn to hide and scare us. This is the hiding spot he chose... A forest ranger was at the trailhead as we were beginning our hike and he mentioned that they had to clear 129 downed trees from the trail that spring. A huge wind storm came through over the winter and caused an incredible amount of downed trees throughout the whole a...

Clamming has been on my "to do" list since moving to Washington five years ago. So this year for my birthday, Josh took a few days off work and we went to Long Beach, WA to clam. There is only one low tide per day open for digging, and the days we were there it switched from the evening to the morning tide. We got into town in the afternoon, went clamming that night, and then woke up the next morning and headed back to the beach for some more. It was so much fun and we all really enjoyed ourselves. The only down side was that we didn't actually get any clams... I'm not sure if the tides weren't quite low enough or if the place we went had already been heavily clammed, but we got skunked. We will have to give it a go again soon because it's probably even more fun if you actually get clams.  Once we arrived we checked into our rental and went straight to the beach. The path from our rental to the ocean went through a wooded area and then dunes. There had be...

Early in March we had a birthday party for Eli. We had it a few weeks early because my parents and sister were in town and he wanted to have them at his party. His party was crazy and loud and he had a fantastic time. He has 11 first cousins and 10 of them were able to be there. He really loves his cousins. Getting a picture with everyone smiling proved to be impossible, but this was the whole motley crew (minus my sister who was taking the picture) Grandma and Grandpa Cousin Alice Opening presents! He loved all his presents Superheroes!  I still can't believe our baby is three. How does time go by so quickly? Happy birthday little man. We love you to the farthest moon and back.

It happened again this year. December came around and we realized that Josh had a use it or lose it situation with his time off. Rather than lose it, he took from December 18th-January 5th off. It was delightful to have him around for those weeks. Since he had such a long time off work we decided that a road trip to Los Angeles, to visit Nana and Papa, was in order. In case you are wondering, that is just over 2,200 miles round trip. Wow. What were we thinking? We drove straight through on the way down and it took 19.5 hours. We arrived early in the morning on the 23rd and spend most of that day recuperating. The following day (Christmas Eve) we went to the beach. It wasn't great beach weather by Southern California standards, but it felt great to us. It was in the 60's and sunny almost every day we were there. In addition to hitting the beach, which we did twice, we also visited an aquarium, the LA zoo, and a train museum. We ate at a few of our favorite restaurants, visi...