Antonsen Family Blog

We made it!

Shannon, Kellen, Adleigh and I drove from our home in Redwood City, CA to Shannon’s parents’ place in Gig Harbor, WA.  The trip is just over 815 miles door to door and Yahoo Maps says we could legally do it in about 13 hours.  We did it in about 14 hours; yeah.

We got up at 4:30am and started coffee.  We had the car packed, full tank of gas and wheels rolling at 5am.  We reached the 5 interstate after 1 1/2 hours of quick driving with kids sleeping soundly, ahead of target.  Gas and go for the first stop and we reached Oregon in 5 hours (10am)  Bam!  Then we stopped at Southerland, OR for second gas stop and lunch at a Dairy Queen after about  7  hours (12pm). We left the lovely town of Sutherlin, OR after about an hour (1pm) and continued north. We hit Portland early rush-hour traffic around 10 hours in (3pm) and … it sucks.

Note on the kids: Up to this point we had been rocking and rolling – Shannon had been managing Kellen and Adleigh beautifully and they had both been really good (about being locked in their seats for 7 hours straight, then back again after 1 hour).  But now, in Portland stand-still traffic, Kellen was “done with the car” as he says, which pretty much means he wants to be anywhere else than where he is at the moment of that statement.  When Kellen is “done with the car”, almost nothing can make him happy and no distraction can pull him away from the fact that this car trip needs to be over.  Shannon was a champion mom and talked him through some distracting activities before pulling out the ace: the Cars movie on the portable DVD player. Bam!  ~2 hours of angelic peace.

In spite of the long trip and the crummy traffic toward the end of the trip, we arrived after 14 hours (7pm) having had an enjoyable experience that we can laugh about and are not too scared to do again in a week when we plan to drive back.  Helps when grammy and grandpa have dinner ready and just want to take the kids off your hands and play with them.

Shannon, Kellen and I spent a nice morning hiking in Edgewood Park on Mother’s day. Kellen loves sitting in his hiking backpack (the one I am wearing in the pictures) and point out the animals. He says “tweet” or “byrd” clearly now – pretty fun. We also sing little songs like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and some of the songs from music class (I don’t remember them well). Can’t wait for the next hike!

With help from Thad (all the way from New York) and Sam and Shannon, Kellen, Cara and Nicky cheering us on, we put in new floor in the TV room a couple of weekends ago. The technical difficulty of putting the floor pieces together was surprisingly low. The time spend pulling up the old carpet and preparing the floor was more substantial than I expected, and the amount of cutting and fitting the floor planks to walls that were not quite square was surprising as well. In spite of a few setbacks, we had a great weekend and managed to get all the floor put in. Now, all that remains is putting in the transition molding to the entry way and fitting baseboard… oh, and doing the other room we bought materials for.

Shannon pulled of a fantastic brunch the last day of work and Jackson, Aurelia, Sofia and Henri came and joined us for a bit which was great. Here are some pictures from the build weekend and thanks again to all that helped!

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There were some Kellen videos I thought were fun, so I’ll just let you see them for yourself in this post. Enjoy.

Spent a wonderful morning having Easter Brunch at Sam and Cara’s (we’ll post pictures when we can get them from their very nice camera), then running errands, cleaning the house (yes, all the boring weekend stuff), and after dinner spent a little time on Skype catching up with Adrienne, Clark and Julie in Chicago, as well as Grandma and Grandpa in Gig Harbor.

Kellen loved the attention and played a game where he would put stickers on people’s faces on the screen. Adrienne, Clark and Julie upped the game by putting actual stickers on their own faces where we said Kellen had put them and acting surprised that they showed up – Kellen loved it.

A very fun evening enabled by technology. Thank you Ebay (who owns Skype).

We had a delicious brunch at the Williams house with Sam, Cara and Nicky. Sam’s family joined as well (Roger, Michelle and her boyfriend Todd), plus we had a Skype video-call with Sam’s family on the East Coast.

The brunch was complete with full service mimosa bar, candy everywhere, Easter Egg hunt in the back yard and delicious brunch, mmmm. Thanks Sam and Cara (and Nicky!).

We’ve posted the rest of the photos on our photo page (click here).

Kellen and mommy spent a nice Saturday together, playing with Easter decorations and setting up the house for the holiday. Kellen really enjoyed the poofy paper balls and played with them all over the house. Well worth the fantastic mess, because he was laughing and playing with that stuff for over an hour!

Here are the rest of the pictures.

We had a fun weekend with the Clelands (Mike & Sandy, plus their twin boys Mark and Dan), which involved an overnight stay, every kind of fondue you can imagine (literally! oil, cheese, chocolate) and lots of delicious food and drink.

Kellen had a great time in their big yard, playing baseball and blowing bubbles – he even ventured up on their full sized trampoline. Thanks Clelands for a great weekend.

Jeannie and Victor came to visit us a couple of weekends ago and we had such a great time. They had a little bit of a delay coming down from Seattle that Friday because of very heavy rain in the Bay Area, but they took it in stride and we had a nice, relaxing first night catching up and watching Kellen.

Saturday we had a great brunch with Annette and Bruce at our favorite brunch place in Redwood City, Alana’s Cafe. In the afternoon, mormor and morfar took care of Kellen and mom and dad happily went car-shopping to replace the trusty Toyota Shannon had since college that Michael was now driving. Michael had a FANTASTIC time test driving cars and Shannon enjoyed the giddy look on Michael’s face.

When we came home, it was time to make dinner and hang out… but Michael couldn’t stop talking about cars, so that took up most of the conversation (it’s a big decision you know!).

Sunday it was fantastic weather, sunny and warm with a light breeze and we packed up the car with a couple of bikes and went on the best bike ride. Shannon and Michael had their own bikes and Kellen has his seat on dad’s bike, so we were set. Jeannie and Jackson had been bike training and were in really good shape for this (kicked our youthful butts!), so they rented two bikes from Blazing Saddles near Ghirardelli square and we were off.

We headed down along the water up toward the bridge, went over Golden Gate bridge enjoying the views and headed down to Fort Baker on the Sausalito side of the bridge where Shannon spent her first years of life.

After Fort Baker (and finding out that the old house was no longer there) we headed down through Sausalito – we didn’t stop, but took in the beautiful views of the little town on our way through. Kellen actually fell asleep in his chair and slumped over on my arm for 10 minutes, but then came to and started pointing and talking

After Sausalito there was a nice, flat 10-mile  ride to Tiburon and our ultimate destination: Sam’s Cafe. We all made it, no worse for the wear, and were ready to enjoy our well deserved afternoon meal of fish and chips with a beer, mmmm. So good.

Finally, we took the ferry back to SF and back to Genoa for a glass of wine and an episode of Castle (the TV show).

Enjoy the rest of the pictures here.

Oh, and here is my favorite video of the month – Kellen chasing a pigeon, saying something like “I won’t hurt you, just stay where you are…”

We went up to Tahoe with Sam, Cara and Nicky. All planning had been done and everyone got out of work early Friday to head up to Tahoe AHEAD of the incoming storm that would bring so much fresh show… alas, we found ourselves in the group-think of the SF Bay Area with hundreds, if not thousands, of people doing the EXACT same thing = gridlock. I’ll spare you the details, but it was the suck.

Once we met up with Sam and Cara, the fun began and we had a great day at Northstar, skiing in shifts and catching up. We had a nice evening at the cabin, got up the next morning for breakfast and a photo shoot and headed home.

It was fun to ski, it was great to play with Kellen in the snow and I would do it again… but I’ll be driving up at some odd hours (think starting before 5am or after 9pm).

Here is Kellen practicing his group hug…