A trip to Lake Oswego

Lake Oswego is just out of Beaverton, and is considered quite luxurious. The houses are very expensive there, and the area is based around the Oswego Lake.

We had not been there, so we thought we would head down to take a look. There are a lot of sculptures around, as well as lovely well kept parks and nice places just to visit. Here are some pictures from our day.

Spring has well and truely arrived.

The weather is starting to fine up. Today is a beautiful day, as was yesterday. There are still patchy days of rain, but it is getting warmer, and more time can be head out and about without the worry of doing things indoors.

Cynfor's soccer is back in-door again though, and below is a picture of him getting ready for the first game of the Spring 2007 season. He loves his soccer, and plays whenever he gets a chance. Actually he is enjoying anything, including throwing the basket ball and playing catch with his ball. Sometimes Jessie will join him, although she enjoys riding her bike more - so generally I will go out and play with him.

Here you can see the street with the trees in spring. We have pretty much seen all four seasons now, just waiting again for the start of summer.

Time to wash the car...

So, luckily for us, currently there are no water restrictions in Portland. We are able to wash our car without that problem. Many people still take their cars down to be washed at a service station, but we chose in this case to have the car hand washed by a professional at home. If you look closely enough - this is the expert washing the car this past friday - hasn't she done a great job?!

Another year older...

Although I know that she is not necessarily happy about it, Tara celebrated her birthday on April 10th! As you can see by the small cake above, we did not necessarily make a huge deal out of the event. Actually the size of the cake was chosen as we don't all necessarily eat a lot of cake, so we did not want to waste it!

Anyhow, we had a good night, Tara chose a lovely Japanese restaurant to go for dinner, which we have been to several times before. It is very good food. We have heard that it is also quite traditional. We had a quiet dinner as a family, then when we returned home, we were too full to eat cake - so we left the cake until the next night!

Anyhow, some pictures of her cake, and her blowing out the "never die" candle.

The two performers

Cynfor and Jessie are dressed up here for their first "public" performance. They were part of a group at a flute recital. The teacher that we use for flute here had a performance at her house. There must have been aroud 40 people at the event, with about 15 - 20 performances. It went for a little over one hour, and Jessie and Cynfor (were the "headline act") performed very well.

We enjoyed the evening, listening to many different people who had different levels of skill when it came to playing the flute.

Easter Hunt...

For us, it is a tradition on Easter Sunday for the kids to get up early and start hunting for easter eggs that the easter bunny has left lying around the house. They find them in all sorts of places, hiding high and low, sometimes in drawers or on top of things.

This year was no exception, and the kids enjoyed their hunt. You can see in the second photograph that they had quite a stash!

After we had the Easter hunt, we headed out to a friend of ours for an Easter dinner. Traditionally it seems that Easter is a little like Christmas here, in that people tend to have a family gathering, and eat together.

We did have a great time though, we ended the night playing a game of Balderdash, which was a lot of fun also.