February 12, 2016

Hiking with Kids: Olallie State Park’s Cedar Butte Trail (North Bend, WA)

In order to feel less guilty about all the junk we’d consume at our Super Bowl extravaganza last weekend, I decided to take the kids on a good calorie burning, heart pumping hike. I don’t really need an excuse to go on a hike, but this was a great way to get the kids out of the house while Slaed (born and raised in Colorado & devoted Denver Broncos fan) prepared, stressed and prayed, for the big game ahead.

As you might have read from our Winter Bucket List post, I’m hoping that the three of us (Georgia, the 1-year old on my back in the carrier) can conquer Little Si this season. The mileage, at 4.7 miles round trip, isn’t something that I’m extremely concerned about, but more the mountain climb and elevation gain (1300 feet). So in preparation, we are training with hikes that are a bit easier, but have relatively similar distance and hill climbing.

Olallie State Park’s Cedar Butte trail definitely fit the bill as another good hike to get ready for the more difficult Little Si. It’s also less popular than it’s neighbor, Rattlesnake Ledge, which was bustling with folks and crammed with cars in the parking lot as we drove by.

To give you an idea of our hiking experience, I once again documented the journey with a video!

Olallie State Park’s Cedar Butte Trail

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February 10, 2016

Road Trip Packing List for Families with Babies and Young Children

We’ll soon be traveling to Vancouver Island, British Columbia for a week of fun and adventure mostly centered around the towns of Victoria and Tofino. It’s hard for me to believe and sort of embarrassing to admit that I wasn’t more organized, but until just recently, I was writing out a new packing list for EVERY SINGLE trip we took! Often I would copy or use a previous packing list as reference, but what a waste of time!

I’ve finally compiled all the notes and scraps of paper, from over 4 years of traveling as a mom, into an organized road trip packing list. Now, I can just quickly print off the list, add items specific to the particular trip we are taking at the time, and start packing!

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February 8, 2016

Kamik SnowKey7: Waterproof Winter Boots Review

Since recommending Kamik Boots for the rain and winter in our recent guide on dressing kids for a rainy and cold day outdoors, I wanted to go more in depth and describe exactly what we love! We purchased the Kamik SnowKey7 Winter boots as a Christmas gift for Bergen this past year, and after almost 2 months of adventuring and playing outdoors in the cold and rain, we’ve been quite pleased. In addition to our regular outdoor activity as a family, Bergen spends up to 5 hours outdoors a few mornings a week at Forest School. Yes, that’s forest school in Seattle with no indoor space, so we needed a boot that would keep his feet dry, warm, and comfortable.

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February 6, 2016

Visiting Olympia’s Nisqually Wildlife Refuge with Kids

We traveled down to the Olympia, Washington area earlier this week because someone who shall remain nameless (okay, it was me) forgot to order her daughter (who is now almost 14 months old) a birth certificate! We need a copy of Georgia’s birth certificate in order to cross the border into Canada for our trip to Vancouver Island later on this month. Rather than wait for it to come in the mail & pay a bunch of shipping costs, we opted to drive a little over an hour to the state’s Center for Health Statistics.

If you know us, you can probably guess we wouldn’t be able to just drive down, retrieve a copy of the certificate, and head back home! No, we’d have to make it into an adventure! So we took an hour and a half or so to explore the nearby Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. I hadn’t visited Nisqually since Bergen was just a wee baby, so I was excited to go back, and experience the wetlands a bit more.

We only had time to make the 1-mile Twin Barns loop, a walk that’s all on boardwalk with several viewpoints and cutoffs along the way to take in the scenery and try our hand at bird watching. We ended up seeing eagles, several types of ducks, geese, and lots of sparrows! We documented our journey around the loop in this quick video:

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February 3, 2016

Family Travel & Vacation Planning: Brainstorm List Printable

Since we’re so big on planning ahead, we almost always have plenty of time research and get excited about upcoming travel and vacation. We get ideas for what to do in the locale that we are visiting from guide books (we almost always purchase one for our trips), fellow travel bloggers, tourism websites, magazines, and just talking with family and friends who have traveled before us. You’d think I’d would have been more organized with all that information coming at me, but really it was just a jumbled mess of torn out pages from the newspaper, magazine clippings, and random notes here and there. Until now!

I finally got around to creating a tool that would help me keep all the potential activities, tours, restaurants, shops, parks, and more organized! It’s just a simple brainstorming list with spaces to jot down those ideas by categories that make sense.

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February 1, 2016

How to Dress Kids for Cold and Rainy Weather (+Video!): Lessons from Forest School

Our 4-year old has survived and thrived in outdoor preschool, also known as Forest School, through the “worst” part of the year! Even though it’s only February, it feels like we’re turning a corner weather-wise. I know that the precipitation and chilly temperatures will continue though so I wanted to share how we dress him for a day outside in the rainy winter!

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Olallie State Park’s Cedar Butte Trail

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