Amy Scott's Thoughts

June has been such a good mix of adventure and rest. We’ve been able to do some summer school, hang out with friends, see family, go on adventures, and just enjoy time around our house. Good times all around. This June feels a little quieter than summers past and honestly, that’s fine. It’s been a good balance. Here are some of the June highlights since my last post.

We enjoyed taking Jeremy and my dad out to dinner for Father’s Day. We went to a local Chinese restaurant our family loves. It was a fun family outing and a tasty meal! The boys and I met up with my forever friend, Christa, for an adventure at the Bill Frank Jr. Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. This is an excellent location for birding and a fun walk to the Puget Sound. It was a cool, calm day and perfect for an outdoor outing. The fun with friends continued for me with a co-op planning meeting and book club this week. I love getting together with my mom friend community!

Friday, we visited the Oregon Zoo as a family. The black bears, polar bears, and tigers were active! The zoo is always a favorite summer activity. We stopped at IKEA on the way home and got a new cabinet for our dining room. I’ve been dreaming of storing board games near our dining room table to make game play easier. Grabbing a game will be simple and having board games on display in our living space shares one of our family values – playing together! I love how it turned out! Also, super thankful for Jeremy and the boys, who built it while I was at book club. It was a wonderful surprise to come home to!

My parents bought us a flat of local strawberries, so we’ve been baking treats and eating strawberries with almost every meal. YUM! We’ve had a streak of warmer weather and the backyard pool has been greatly appreciated for cooling down. The boys enjoyed a playdate with friends yesterday. They ran around in the woods behind our house for hours making up an imaginary kingdom. These summery moments are some of my favorites. Yummy treats, fun outings, time with family and friends… We are grateful and loving these summer days!

Our family just returned from a somewhat-spur-of-the-moment road trip through Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park. We did a similar trip in August of 2020 and we loved it so much that we decided to do it again! It was fun to return with older kiddos and not in pandemic conditions. Also, there is a big difference in the weather between May and August! We saw so much snow on this trip! It was crazy… and cold!

The highlight of the trip was definitely animal spotting. Jeremy and the boys had a bucket list of animals they wanted to see and I’m happy to say we achieved success! We saw a thousand elk and bison. No joke! So many! We saw six grizzly bears, a black bear, two foxes, a marmot, a snowshoe hare, a herd of big horn sheep, eight coyotes (three of which were pups), and a moose! The favorite animal find was the Junction Butte wolf pack in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone. The first time we found the pack, we could only see them through the spotting scope. The second time we found them, they were much closer and they even howled! The eerie part was hearing the other half of the pack respond behind us. We were literally surrounded by wolves! Thankfully, they were at a safe distance, so we weren’t in any danger.

Animals might have been the highlight of the trip for the boys, but the geysers and geothermal features of Yellowstone were greatly appreciated as well! We saw Old Faithful erupt five different times and we happened to be in the right place at the right time to watch Riverside Geyser erupt. We all were in awe of the many bubbling and splashing springs. The colors in the different pools are beautiful and steaming geyser basins are endlessly fascinating. Any thermal feature that didn’t have a name plaque in front of it was “officially” named by the Scott boys. In 2020, the visitor centers weren’t open, so it was neat to explore and learn more about the parks at these locations. The boys also became Junior Rangers at Yellowstone for a second time.

Our visit to Grand Teton National park worked out perfectly with the weather. We had cloudy, snow days at Yellowstone, but we had blue skies at Grand Teton NP. The mountains are breathtaking and we were glad they weren’t hidden behind clouds! We stopped at Jenny Lake because it was a favorite from our last visit. It was surprising how much snow was still on the ground and how much ice was over the lake. We took a short walk beside lake and we were sliding over deep snow patches between sections of bare pavement. The snow and ice didn’t keep us from enjoying our time, though! We also visited Mormon Row on this trip through the park. We missed this site last time. It’s a small road with old barns left behind by Mormon settlers. The barns with the majestic mountains in the background are an iconic photo opp for the park. It was neat to see them in-person.

We made one final scenic stop on our way home at Shoshone Falls outside of Twin Falls, ID. This waterfall was one I’d planned to visit before and those plans didn’t pan out. It was rewarding to finally make it there! And the waterfall was beautiful! In fact, I would say that the waterfalls we saw on the trip were some of my favorite stops even if they were quick! We saw Undine Falls, Gibbon Falls, the Upper and Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, Firehole Falls, and finally Shoshone Falls.

We are so thankful we had this opportunity as a family to explore such a beautiful and awe-inspiring part of God’s creation! There really is no place quite like Yellowstone! The kids enjoyed a week off of school, but really the whole week was like one field trip after another. My love of field trips is deep! Now to start daydreaming about (and saving for) our next National Park adventure!

The Daily Adventure Breakdown:

• Monday: The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, MT
• Tuesday: Yellowstone – Lamar Valley, Mammoth Hot Springs, Norris Geyser Basin
• Wednesday: Yellowstone – Fountain Paint Pot Trail, Midway Geyser Basin (Grand Prismatic Spring), Old Faithful, Grand Canyon of Yellowstone (Upper & Lower Falls), Hayden Valley
  Thursday: Yellowstone – Biscuit Basin, Upper Geyser Basin (Old Faithful x 3), Black Sand Basin, Lamar Valley
• Friday: Leaving Yellowstone – Firehole Canyon Drive, Old Faithful, Grand Teton National Park – Colter Bay, Jackson Lake, Jenny Lake, Mormon Row, Moose-Wilson Road
• Saturday: Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls, ID and Hermiston, OR Les Schwab to fix a flat tire!

It’s officially spring! It’s actually felt like summer here in the PNW this last week. We’ve had sunny days and temps into the mid-70’s. It’s been lovely! However, today is back to the usual – clouds and drizzle. Spring is like that… Sunny one day, rainy the next. While I’ve loved the sunshine, the trees are waking up and seasonal allergies were definitely a thing over the weekend. My hubby sneezed dozens of times over the weekend! I’m hoping the drizzle today will wash the pollen out of the air. There is a price to pay for sunshine.

Life has been full since my last post. My cautious optimism panned out and we’ve been able to see many people and do fun things. No more sickness keeping our friends at home. Hooray! Last week, we started new classes with our homeschool co-op. The kids are enjoying botany and American government this spring. Owen, especially, has been inspired with how the botany class as lined up with our own science at home. He has had his microscope out multiple times this week examining plant life.

I had a first this last week. I was asked if I could share some tips about home organization (especially, kid storage) with a mom from our church. I love home organization so it was fun to share this interest with another mom. I got to wax poetic about storage bins, labels, and my enjoyment of The Home Edit. Such a good time! Okay, I realize keeping a tidy house doesn’t make everyone want to do jazz hands, but it certainly gets me excited!

A special highlight of the last week was a visit with my forever friend, Maggie. She moved across the country at the end of 2023, but she was in the PNW for a few weeks assisting her parents. She came to visit me on the last leg of her trip. She arrived Thursday afternoon and we got to walk/talk while the kids played at a local park then we were able to go out to dinner together. She spent the night at our house and we were her shuttle to the airport the next day. It was so good to spend hours chatting and just being on the same side of the country. The countdown is on until her next visit!

Friday, after dropping Maggie at the airport, we went south to Oregon City. We had an appointment to get our van serviced. Luckily, the dealership is right by the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Visitor Center. This historical museum has been on my field trip wish list for a few years, so this was the perfect place to wait while our vehicle was looked at. The kids had a lot of fun making candles, fabric toys, and petting their collection of fur pelts. The last month has been full of awesome field trips. We love adventuring as a family and learning together! The boys did a presentation at our co-op yesterday about our visit to the museum on Friday. They shared Oregon Trail facts and their highlights of the experience. It was neat to see them take something they learned and share it with others.

Other highlights include having friends over on Saturday and celebrating St. Patrick’s Day on Sunday. My kiddos know I’m a pincher, so they made a big deal of wearing green this year. We made green mini-waffles for dinner with shamrocks on them. On Monday, we prepared our March Madness brackets. We have our brackets printed and on the fridge ready to highlight wins and scratch out losses. Yesterday was a beautiful first day of spring! The kids got to play on the playground with friends at co-op, enjoy their classes, and then spend the evening at piano lessons with Nana. I slipped away with a friend last night to shop for books at Goodwill. I’ll share all about my book haul in my book blog at the end of the month.

And there you have it! All the big and little things of the last week. It’s been a good stretch of sunny weather, time with friends, and lots of fun.

March is here! It’s been a bit of mix. Some big days and some very quiet days. A major theme of March so far has been rescheduling. Our co-op crew has been sick and it has greatly altered our plans this last week. We had plans on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday all be cancelled and/or rescheduled. Last week looked like a very full week, until it wasn’t. It’s all good, though. We don’t mind the extra time around the house. We love being home just as much as we love being out and about.

What is there to share if all we’ve done is reschedule life? Well, at the beginning of the month we purchased a new-to-us minivan! We’ve had a silver Dodge Caravan for the last 8 years and it’s been a good vehicle for us. As we started to talk about replacing it, we decided to look into another Dodge Caravan because we like them so much. We were able to purchase a newer model with fewer miles. Our new van is black and has been named Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. We are marveling at new-to-us features like doors that open automatically, seat warmers, and a back-up camera. Our old van was low-tech, so there has been much to learn about this newer model. I hope Toothless will be a beloved addition to our family for many years to come. Now I need to relearn what vehicle to look for in the parking lot!

The other big adventure we had this month was a trip OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). We’ve attempted to visited multiple times and it felt like it was impossible to make it actually happen. We were thrilled to finally have this family field trip! Highlights of our visit were the main exhibits about tyrannosaurs and animal survival skills. The physics lab was one of Owen’s favorite places and Graham thanked me over and over for the planetarium show we watched. Super fun, super educational. I know I’ve said it before, but I love field trips! They are my favorite!

That’s the update for the first half of the month! The latter half will be full of all the things… reschedule plans, St. Patrick’s Day, Jeremy’s birthday, Easter – so many fun times to look forward to with family and friends! However, the quiet start to the month does have me wondering… Will it be as full as I expect? Probably not… But I will be thankful for the opportunities that come and be grateful for pauses to rest when things don’t pan out. Spring is just around the corner and I am cautiously optimistic for what’s ahead!

February has been a full month. After a super quiet January, our pace of life has picked up! Our calendar this month is a mix of playdates, family dinners, church commitments, dental appointments, well checks, and my personal favorite – field trips! Oh, also add in low-key celebrations like the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day. It seems there has been something going on every day!!!

Let’s chat about our field trips! I love field trips. They are one of my favorite parts of homeschooling. Life is a full of learning opportunities and so many adventures can be classified as a field trip. On Friday, we took off for the Tillamook Creamery. This is an annual adventure for us! We love watching the cheese being packaged and processed. We tried the cheese samples, had lunch, and got ice cream. The boys enjoyed racing to see how fast they can milk a cow (a display cow, not a real cow). The Tillamook Creamery is always a good time!

After Tillamook, we made our way up the Oregon Coast. We stopped in Cannon Beach to visit Haystack Rock. The tide was out so the tide pools around the rock were exposed. We saw some small fish and sea anemones. It was a cold and windy walk to Haystack Rock, but our kids come alive at the beach. They didn’t mind the chilly weather and had fun exploring around the tide pools.

Our last stop on the way home was to see a dead fin whale that washed up on Sunset Beach. I didn’t know much about fin whales until this last week. They are the second largest whale and they rarely wash ashore because they stay out in deeper waters. Owen recently wrapped up a whale unit in science, so this seemed like a good chance to see a whale up close. The boys got to see the baleen and see the size of the large whale. The sight was a bit more gruesome than I expected as the whale had been cut open and certain parts had been harvested. It was kind of gross, but still educational!

Yesterday, we joined our homeschool co-op for a field trip to the Washington State Capitol. Jeremy took the day off to join us. His presence was so appreciated! It was our family’s first visit to the Capitol and it didn’t disappoint. Through a co-op connection, we were able to explore parts of the building that usually aren’t open to the public. We even got to go on to the senate floor and take a picture (the senate obviously wasn’t in session at the moment). We had a short class on what is a bill and the process of getting a bill to become a law. After our time with the senate staff, we went on a guided tour which showed us the rest of the building. One of the highlights of our visit was the fact that it was Potato Day. Washington potato farmers set up a baked potato bar and offer baked potatoes to anyone who would like one. They also gave away reusable bags and potato recipe cards. Jeremy did a little research and they say about 1,600 potatoes are given out on Potato Day. It made for a crowded visit, but it was also a fun bonus to the experience!

We have some more field trips planned this spring and I am so excited for them! Getting to experience learning outside in the world is so valuable. We are making memories as a family and I love that we get to explore the world alongside our kids. We’ve had so many conversations as a family about what we learned this last week, what we enjoyed the most, and clarifying what we experienced. I’m so thankful for these opportunities. Field trips are one of the best parts of homeschooling!