We made it home

We were gone for 3 weeks. We traveled to Tigard, OR, for a Mom's Breastaurant event (where we got to meet up and play with an EM friend, Cathy, and her girls). Then we went to Eugene for a few nights to stay with another EM friend, Brandy, and her husband Jon and their daughter, Juniper. We also met up with Shawna and her kiddos, Colton and Ellyana, for an afternoon at the park, for fun and photos! Shawna is a photographer, and she's taken some awesome pics of the kids (yes, yes, I'll get to posting).

After that, we headed to Paisley OR for a gathering dubbed 'HippieFest' - a gathering of moms and kids from EarthyMommies.com. We've known each other for years there, but rarely get to hang out in the flesh. So we set a date and had a party. Six mom (including Shawna, Brandy, Cathy and yours truly, along with Katherine and Victoria), 11 kiddos, and one DH (Katherine's) hung out in a large 3 bedroom cabin at a hot springs for the weekend. It was hot, mosquito infested, and one day we had no running water until noon, but it was great! :)

Then we headed to Chico to spend a couple nights with Katherine and her family before we all headed to Quincy for the High Sierra Music Festival, where Mom's Breastaurant had a booth. It was camping, though not really roughing it. The event is on a fairgrounds, so there are bathrooms and showers (with lines to use them and often no hot water) and water spigots located here and there for refilling various water bottles. Our booth was moved from the location it had occupied at last year's festival, but that was not a bad thing. Now we're in the kids area, so Sayer and Duncan and Katherine's kiddos could get up in the morning, have breakfast, and go play with the toys, kids, craft activities, music activities, sand pit (filled with birdseed) ... Kid wrangling this year was *much* easier than last year. And we had exactly the same number of mothers come to use the booth in our new location as we did in the old location - which is awesome, given that the move was last minute and the maps showed us in the old location.

Anyway, I had internet connections at the hotel in Tigard, and at Brandy's and Katherine's houses, so I could post updates about bookstores and story times and all the time we spent in Chuck E. Cheese's and the like. But at the hot springs, and during HSMF, nada. So yeah, things have been a little slow on the blog for a week or so.

But! We're home now! So things should be picking back up, right? (Um, yeah, we've been home since Monday evening, and this I'm just now sitting down to post ... Was working through the mountain of laundry first.)