Josh's birthday, and Farewell to Fairbanks! - August part 1

Birthday morning presents!

August is a lovely month in Alaska. We started by celebrating Josh’s 3rd birthday! We celebrated on the day with lots of candles.

To get Josh excited for his birthday, we got a book about birthdays from the library and read it every night for a few weeks. Josh’s favorite part was the page with the cake. I would sing “Happy Birthday” to him and then we would blow out the candles on the cake. Since the candles were also his favorite part of his 2nd birthday, we used candles at every opportunity on his birthday this year.

We started the day with a candle-studded chocolate donut. 

We sang and blew it out more than once. Then we rode the train at the park and got another donut for lunch (also with a candle in it at Fred Meyer).

Round two - donut with candle at Fred Meyer for lunch!

Birthday cars.

For dinner we got a hamburger (with a candle in it) and a movie (Hop). 

Mia helping finish Josh's hamburger.

Then Josh indulged in the chocolate whipped cream frosting of his birthday cake (with a candle in it) and also sampled quite a few of the chocolate sugar cookies I had prepared for his birthday party. 

 

 

 

Scout helping wrap presents.

 

The weekend after his birthday was when we threw Josh his birthday party! We invited a lot of the kids we’ve noticed play well with Josh.

We had a fun little bash with a bounce house (courtesy of Jed and Crystal - thank you!), 

awesome huge bubbles (courtesy of Mario - thank you!), 

two pinatas (courtesy of yours truly, and Josh who took over the painting when he saw me decorating one), 

 

hamburgers and hotdogs, hot chocolate after playing outside (who ever heard of needing hot chocolate for an August birthday party?! Only in Fairbanks!), 

chocolate sugar cookies, 

Chocolate sugar cookies with buttercream frosting. Holy smokes were they good!

 and the coup de grace: the best train cake this chica has ever made!

Happy as a clam - making a mess in the kitchen!

Josh's super train cake. I was thoroughly impressed with myself, I don't mind admitting!

Some wonderful presents from some wonderful little friends.

Mmmmm buttercream frosting!

Next time, instead of making phenomenal buttercream frosting and painstakingly putting together this cake over the space of three days, I will frost a plate and give it to Josh. That’s because the only part of the cake he came back for was the frosting. Over the next hours and days, he would wander over to the counter and take a big swipe of frosting to enjoy.

We kept the bounce house for a few days and used it inside.

Josh had the time of his life at the county fair - he was still wild about farm animals from his Duck on a Bike book, and he got all the farm animals he could handle!

 
 

"You guys know you're crazy, right?"

He was stoked to ride the pony until it was time to actually get on one - then this was as close as he got to riding a pony. 


We paid through the nose to drive these cool little cars, and generally had a great time. 



 

The sheep-goats.

Josh wandered around the livestock barns endlessly telling me what each animal was. His favorites were the pigs and the sheep/goats (see previous post :) ), although he got a huge thrill out of the bunnies and whatnot in the petting zoo.








 

Saying "choo-chooo!!"

Mario stopped working a few days before we were scheduled to fly out of Fairbanks, so between packing sessions while the kids were sleeping, we took advantage of our mornings to visit Chena Hot Springs (twice in one week!), ride the train at Pioneer Park a few times, and enjoy the wonderful puddles!

And then it was time to go.


It was certainly bittersweet to leave Fairbanks. We will miss living so close to Jed, Crystal & Co. 

Natalie, Scout, Collin and Josh.

We will miss living somewhere so darn friendly - Alaskans (especially in the interior where we were) definitely have a village mentality. One day while I was driving by myself, I saw a car stalled at an intersection. By the time I pulled around and found a place to park so I could get out and help, FIVE other cars had already stopped to help. Every time we stopped by the road to switch drivers or whatever, everyone who passed us made sure we were okay. I kind of hated checking out at the grocery store because most of the time the checker would be so chatty I couldn’t get out the door. 

The midnight sun in June.

We’ll miss the fun of going to bed at midnight and not needing to turn on a single light to read a book in summer (although I sorely missed seeing the stars for four solid months - there was a huge meteor shower in July that I got up in the middle of the night to see, but there wasn’t a single star in the sky because it was still too light out). Even when the sun would dip below the horizon for a few hours, it would leave a perpetual perfect sunset for those hours. Amazing.

We will miss the absolutely stunning landscape and the easy access to said landscape (as long as you have the proper insect and bear protection). 

 
We will miss the aurora borealis. We’ll miss the public use cabins. We’ll absolutely miss the comfort and ease of a normal 9-5 job with paid vacation. We’ll miss the urban moose and the general sense of adventure of living somewhere as unique and awesome as Alaska.


We won’t miss -50 degree weather. We won’t miss 20+ hours of darkness. 

The sun at noon in December.

We won’t miss living in a place so small that they announce what’s on the menu for school lunch on the morning news and over the radio, along with what school buses are running a few minutes late. We won’t miss the utter lack (except for Crystal’s Bounce ‘n Play, of course) of activities for children, especially in the winter. Me and the kids would go to Fred Meyer, PetCo, or Barnes & Noble for fun in the winter. Wahoo. We won’t miss the lack of quality, affordable food. (We are excitedly working on making up for lost time in this area here in Austin where the food is excellent and cheap! Just come visit us - we'll show you!) A dinner out for us in Fairbanks typically consisted of a burger from Carl’s Jr. Super exciting.

In short, we loved our year in Fairbanks and we are so very glad to have had such a wonderful experience there. And we are glad it was only for a year. :)
 

From Fairbanks, we shipped all of our belongings to the Outside (as Alaskans call anything that's not Alaska) and hopped on a plane for Juneau to begin the 45-day journey from Fairbanks to our new home in Austin, Texas. Let the travel blogging begin!

Camping (fail), Camping, and more fun stuff! - July 2012 part 2

The midnight sun.

We tried to use every moment we could in July to finish our time in Alaska with a bang. We attempted to go camping . . . twice. And were chased back into our car both times by horrific, and I do mean truly horrific, numbers of mosquitos and other flying, biting things. We love a good adventure, but seriously, it was bad. Even when you have on ‘squito dope so they don’t bite you, there are so freakin’ many of them that you inhale them. We needed what the other campers we saw were wearing: full head-covering mosquito netting.

Yeah. Seriously disgusting.

We had an enormously successful weekend at a lovely little public use cabin called Gladfelter. Gladfelter cabin sits on Quartz Lake, where we stayed previously the week before Scout was born. 

Gladfelter Cabin - awesome!

 

Gladfelter Cabin, however, is not accessible by car. You have to either hike your stuff in about a mile, which would have been some serious work considering how much *crap* you need when you have kids out camping, or you can boat in. Jed and Crystal generously offered their little boat for us to use, and boy did we use it! 

 

Our trip in was a bit nerve-wracking. The lake is shallow enough in many places that it is choked with lily pads, which means you can’t use your boat motor. Then we tried to go straight to the cabin through some reeds and got lost and stuck.

 

We finally made it, though, and had the most wonderful time! Josh loved to throw rocks in the water, of course, and loved to go for boat rides.

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For some reason he wouldn't walk out, only crawl.

 

 

Yes, this is how we roll!

 

 

Scout loved exploring the cabin and the beach and played her socks right off. 

 

These pants fought a good fight, but were no match for cabin dust!

We went for hikes and boat rides, played with glow sticks even though it never really got dark, and had a little bonfire on the beach our last evening. Lovely.

Fresh from our cabin trip!

A little too much vacation for this little monkey!

At the end of July, Mario’s boss hosted the 3rd annual Birch Lake Judicial Conference, which is basically a good excuse to have a barbeque out at his cabin on the lake.

Dan Winfree, of the Alaska Supreme Court, and his wife have been wonderful during our year here. We spent one of our first weekends in Fairbanks at their cabin, so it was only fitting to spend one of our last there as well. 

Dan and Cathy have been generous, kind, and genuinely interested in helping us in life and to enjoy our Alaskan adventure. We thoroughly enjoyed spending time at their cabin. 

 

Highlights of this particular trip were riding jet-skis and wave runners (which, despite my family’s propensity for motor sports, I had never tried before visiting Dan’s place), taking Josh for multiple spins on the quad and jet-skis, Dan’s famous deep-fried turkey, Scout’s first dip in the lake, a bonfire on the beach, and great company. 

Josh doing what else but throwing rocks!