Bucket 'o strawberries

Last week was the Rose Festival parade in Portland and even though Brian was going to be gone (drove down south for a funeral) that day I really wanted to take the girls. Fate was on my side because not only did Marna come up and stay the night (yay for date nights!), Amanda generously shared tickets with us to a personal grandstand area with free food and stadium seating. 

I'm not very good at confidently navigating my way in downtown Portland and trying to find parking, so we took the Max (train)!

They really were thrilled, they just didn't know I snapped the picture

 The stop we get on the train is perfect, it's almost empty and we have our choice of seats. Slowly but surely it fills up, and fill up it did. I wish I took a picture of how crowded it was. Let's just say that is the only time you can't have a bubble when it comes to strangers.

Still happy though

 It's about an hour ride into Portland and I wasn't 100% sure where to get off, I asked some people that seemed to know the area better and they offered their advice. It was very nice, but I wish I would've listened to myself and gone with my gut because we got off about 5 stops too early...on the wrong side of the river. I realized this about 2 minutes after getting off the max so we had to wait for the next one. Finally it comes, we get off on the right one and I am still a little lost. We asked, they answered, we walked and finally found it.
The first thing we did when we got in was get the girls ice cream. They deserved it 1,000 times over. I could not believe how good they were through the whole ordeal, they were seriously a dream, patient and quiet and fabulous.
Reese promptly made a ginormous mess with her cone (at least I was smart enough to get her vanilla) but I didn't even care, she deserved a treat.

Reese loves her 'Manda

We had fun and the girls loved the parade. It helped that the Buell boys were there and Grammy, it's always nice to have so much help!

On Sunday Heather had a great idea to go pick strawberries at this festival, the girls had a ton of fun.

Ridin' the pig

 

Reese was hamming it up for everyone on the hay ride

We got a huge bucket of strawberries and oh my they are delicious!! I froze a bunch of them and have been munching on the rest, apparently I am the only one who likes strawberries in my household. I thought Reese did but she is on a strawberry strike currently...and anything that isn't milk or crackers, grrr.
So yeah, it was a great weekend jam packed with fun.