I forget, sometimes, that when we left Portland Briton was almost 5 and Evie just 1. Too young to remember much of anything. It's a funny thing to be introducing your kids to a place you know and love so well. Not that we know everything about Portland, or that the things we knew before are all the same, but it's been our city for so long, even when we were gone, that it's hard to remember that the kids don't know it at all. The perfect excuse, we decided, to re-discover the city.
Living here with two elementary school aged kids is different that it was being here with toddlers or babies or no kids. Less play-group and more go for a bike ride than it was last time. Less drinks at midnight and more lazy Sunday brunch than it was when we were first married. Fun, either way.
We've ridden bikes along the waterfront when the cherry trees bloomed and gone to visit the houses they lived in as babies. Wandered playgrounds they used to love and visited our favorite cafe - still small, still serving buttery scones as soon as you sit down at the table, still delicious. Between breaks in the rain we spent a Saturday morning at the Leach Botanical Garden, puttering down the trails and checkout out the difference between the "wet" coniferous forest and the "dry" coniferous forest and enjoying the sun.
We've got a whole list of places to go and things to show them. Crabbing in Newport, Hoyt Arboretum, Forest Part, Grant Pool, Cannon Beach, Triangle Lake...all sorts of places that they don't remember, all sorts of adventures Will and I have had but not with them (yet). We're not in a hurry, this isn't New York with a one year deadline. We have time. But oh, it's so fun to share this with them.