Trip to the Coast...

Since Elvin has a break from classes, we decided to take an overnight trip to Newport, a town on the Oregon coast about 2.5 hours from where we live. But we, of course, leave only on Eliana's timing. We can no longer just put her in her car seat, she must climb in herself, or as she puts it: "Eliana do self!!!" And she needs to hang onto the handlebar for a few seconds before settling in. Eliana actually does pretty well on long car rides now. After we got there and checked into our hotel, we visited a state park that had one of the best tide pools we've ever been to. We saw sea anemones, purple sea urchins, small fish, and star fish of various colors. Although Eliana knows about star fish from books, the real ones are all scrunched up and she didn't recognize them in their natural state.
At night, we ate dinner at a Rogue Ales pub house. While Elvin is downing his order of sampler beers, Eliana entertains herself with the Lego set. While playing, it became obvious that she is a "sorter." Without prompting, she took out the pieces from the mesh sack and categorized each one according to color.

The next day we visited the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which is a small but well designed aquarium. It has a great hands-on tide pool, with even more animals than we saw yesterday. It has tiny little crabs, sea cucumbers, and other critters.

The Aquarium also has a tunnel in a large tank filled with shark and other fish. Eliana was satisfactorily amazed, but also kept asking to see dolphins.

The only dolphin was a cement one at the playground. I guess one day we'll have to make our way to Sea World so she can see live ones.

Overall, we had a good time and drove home in time to host a Mother's Day dinner at our house.