October 🍁🍂🎃

 Today was a lovely day for a pumpkin patch visit:

More fun to come in one of this family’s favorite months!

8 is great

 Last week Maren turned 8! She celebrated three times, first with grandma/auntie/cousin,

then on her actual birthday, which was a school night, with just us,

then at a party with her new soccer friends:

And now, after a week with lots of cake, we are living with an eight year old. Happy birthday Maren! 🎂🎉🎈🎁🍰🧁

Early Fall 🍂🍁

 First day of preschool,

Corvallis fall festival,

soccer,

and an assemblage of fall things collected on a walk around the block:

Many signs of early fall, and so much more to come 🍂🍁

Goodbye Prius

On Wednesday, we said goodbye to the Prius.

Jeff drove it to Vancouver and sold it to the Toyota dealership near his brother’s house. It was the first car that Jeff and I bought new (and we are only now on our second), and we had it for over 10 1/2 years. It was a great car, and we didn’t want to give it up, but it had to be.

However, the RAV4 hybrid is turning out to be a pretty good replacement. Today we took it down a dirt road to a very nice hike, and it did well :-)

 The Prius was the perfect car for us in Regina, but maybe the RAV4 will be our perfect Oregon car ❤️

Firsts and new things

This week Maren had her first day of school, both Maren and Linden had their first soccer games and practices, and Jeff had his first week of soccer coaching. He volunteered to coach Maren’s team, because it seemed like otherwise no one would do it and there might not actually be a team. 

Maren likes her school, which is good. She is doing second grade again (even though she did second grade last year and did well), because otherwise she would be with kids a year older than her, and this way she is with kids her own age. The age cut offs in Canada and the US are very different, so she is too young to be in third grade here. Overall, it seems to be going well.

The kids are loving soccer. Jeff was quite stressed about coaching at first, since he hasn’t played since he was in kindergarten and actually doesn’t know the rules or anything about soccer. But the first week went well and hopefully it will get even better from here. He seems to be doing a great job.

And the other news this week is that we bought a new car, which was unplanned, but overall fine. The short version of the long story is that we can’t register our car here, because it doesn’t have a particular safety sticker, and Toyota has stopped cooperating with imports. Since our car is Canadian, even though the exact same model is sold in the US (Prius V), we can’t legally bring it into the US unless we pay exorbitant import fees, which are about half the value of the car. So we bought a brand new RAV4 hybrid, and Jeff has to drive to Vancouver BC to sell the Prius. 

I am hoping this is the last ridiculous, cross-border moving thing we have to deal with, though I actually expect more to come up. This move has not been particularly easy!

And here are some fun pictures from the past week or so: