A Bit Up I-5

MAKE A SPLASH: We had a quiet morning around the house cleaning, with a focus being on getting the various vintage gaming consoles detangled and in an orderly fashion.

About 1:30 we decided to head out on a field trip. We were going to go to the Bug Safari here in Seattle, but the sun was peaking out, so we thought we'd check out a waterpark a friend told us about, in Everett. It's part of 197 acre Forest Park.
Above, CJ tries some karate on the water. Not sure who won.
They tried to stop the spouting, to no avail. CJ liked the umbrella of water best.

It wasn't full on sunny, but in an hour of splashing the kids never did complain about being cold.

BARNSTORMING: Everett's Forest Park has a little petting zoo feature, Animal Farm. If you want to see it, you'd better hurry. Signs all over said it's closing on Aug. 14, and based on these goats' wardrobe, they're getting rid of the livestock. Annabelle made friends with a sheep named Elvis!
We saw some chubby bunnies, and they saw us, too.
There were also ducks, a couple of calves, some chickens, and some ponies.

CLAMBERING: After the farm, we headed back up toward the water park to check out the (darn big) adjacent playground, with an impressive amount of climbing structures. CJ has a proclivity for scaling things and then crossing them on the topside. He did it with everything there, I do believe.Annabelle enjoyed an iron train ... and a spinning thingee.
MAMA MIA: After our Everett excursion, we headed a bit west and southward toward Seattle. That route took us to Mukilteo, a lovely little town on the Sound. It also happens to be home to Diamond Knot Brewery. How convenient. When we arrived at the restaurant we learned it was both happy hour and kids eat free night. Double bonus.

The kids love the place because they get to design their own pizzas there. Here's Annabelle's before - she called it Pepperoni Smile ... And here's the after. She was very surprised to see that the pepperoni smile had sucked up into a pucker! Across the street from the pizza/beer place is a lovely new community center.

Adjacent to that is a large plaza with a great view of the Sound. Just a couple weeks back, we motored by on the Sound on our whale watching excursion.

We spied a marker next to the plaza. Apparently in this spot, a whole bunch of American Indians once signed away a whole bunch of land. I'm afraid it turned out not to be a very good deal for them. :/

From there, we made our way down to the Mukilteo waterfront. I was surprised to spy a lighthouse there. There was a thin strip of a sandy beach. And as if the beach wasn't enough - there was also a great playground there!ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT?: I just discovered this photo on my camera's card from last week, when we were at Gpa's birthday. When he spied a cookbook full of supposedly Elvis' favorite recipes, CJ insisted upon reading it. He fell asleep in the process, but the next morning asked me if we could make some of the recipes on Elvis' birthday. :)