Trains and Cars and a Successful Outfit Picture!

These pictures were taken earlier on Valentine's Day, while Jake was still very much awake and happy and not ready to throw himself on the floor at the sight of a camera.

He got some Valentine's gifts from a special family member (thanks, Aunt Dotty!) He was THRILLED to find that Thomas the Train is finally in his hands.
He also got this very wonderful wooden car, which he immediately dubbed "cool car."
And then back to Thomas the Train. He immediately wanted to take Thomas home to play with Gordon, Lady, Salty, Bill & Ben, and Duck.

Playtime for Jake

I decided it was time to take some more pictures of Jake!

He loves playing with his cars. He's started to get into organizing them -- lining them up and having them take turns going for a drive.
Well in this case, the train.

We went to this wonderful theatre called Play after Play, where we watched a children's play put on by 3 actors called The Curing Fox and afterwards all the children had chances to do gentle tumble play with the 3 actors on gym mats. Jake loved it! He would eagarly await each turn to go around on the mat and play. It was hard to leave, but it was already past naptime and when we got home I was able to move him from the car to the couch without him opening his eyes.

kaBLAM!

Friday afternoon the 3 of us left town to drive to Black Butte Ranch for a weekend away with my parents. We were less than 3/4 mile away from the entrance to the ranch when... kaBLAM! The car was suddenly driving on the rubble strip and refused to let me pull it back onto the road. We quickly figured out that we had a flat, and carefully pulled over to the shoulder and onto the dirt.

The tire hadn't only gone flat... it had blown up. Because we were going out of town for the weekend, the car was packed full, and we had to fully unload the back in order to get to the spare tire and the tools. So on the side of the road we had Jake's bicycle, stroller, a cooler, and a bunch of bags containing groceries and various other things. It was quite the pile. I wish I had gotten a picture of that but I was too busy making sure Jake stayed with me on the side of the road away from the cars passing on the highway. Thankfully, Mike had been able to leave work at lunchtime and we had gotten on our way in the early afternoon, so it was still light out when this happened and Mike was able to change the tire in no time and we arrived at Black Butte.

The next day we drove the car into the town of Sisters.
We definitely need to replace this sad-looking tire. And unfortunately, on Subaru cars you can't just replace one tire, you have to replace all four of them so they balance out completely. Ouch.
So while the tires were getting replaced, we went for a walk and admired the beautiful mountains -- South, Middle, and North Sister. Jake stayed with my parents, so we had an unexpected and rather expensive sort of date combined with an errand.
We went to our most favorite coffeehouse.
We sat under this poor, dead head-corpse magnificent wall-mounted head.
And drank our hot drinks to celebrate our $557 new tires. (Ignore the fact that we completely forgot to bring our reusable coffee cups.)
Then we went and picked up the car and admired our new tires.