I am the oldest of five children. We span nearly ten and one-half years from oldest to youngest, four boys and then a rather special little sister. Today we reach something of a milestone: that youngest of the Hubbs children, our sister Rebecca, turns 21. To honor her on her birthday, I thought I’d pull out some photos. Unfortunately, I don’t have any really OLD ones to post.

(She’s the one in the middle in this picture, with my wife Becky on the right and Aaron’s fiancee Emily on the left.)

At Andrew’s wedding this summer, with her oldest brother:

She’s HOW old?

Happy birthday, sis! We love you lots!

Life lately at our house:

If you’re looking for a little bit of amusement you could do worse than checking out YearbookYourself.com. It is pretty much what it sounds like it is – you upload a picture of yourself and it gives you some idea of what your highschool yearbook photos might have looked like any year from the 1950’s through the 1990’s. I had a little bit of fun this afternoon.

For reference, here’s the picture I gave it to work with:

Here’s my 1962 yearbook photo. My face is a little oversized in this one, it didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped.

Here’s 1968.

Here’s 1970. This is definitely my favorite.

Most of the rest of the 70’s didn’t work out too well because of the hair it tried to put on me. So, we fast-forward to 1984. Now, this hair isn’t that great, either.

By the time we get to 1988, it starts to get to something almost believable…

And then here’s 1994. I started my senior year of high school in 1994. The scary part: I had one of those cardigans, and I loved it.

Our oldest daughter Laura turns 4 today. So far she’s celebrated the morning with a bowl of Rice Krispies and a new Veggie Tales DVD. She’s quite excited about it.

Here’s a little photo retrospective:

Laura at one day old:

Laura on her first birthday:

Laura on her second birthday (gotta love the Elton John glasses):

Laura on her third birthday:

Laura, almost 4, at Andrew’s wedding a couple weeks ago:

She is turning into quite a young lady… time just flies. We are so blessed to have a sweet girl who loves her family and loves Jesus. Happy birthday, Laura!

After the beach we took a couple of days to travel up from Long Beach to Leavenworth. The stop in Yakima wasn’t really anything to write home about – Yakima is quite different from the other places in Washington we visited – dry, dusty, more desert than anything. But it was a good stopping-off point. Becky shot pictures from the moving van like a wild woman. She did get a rather nice one of Mount Rainier:

Also, on our way up to Leavenworth, the girls had fun throwing rocks into this little mountain stream:

Once we made it to Leavenworth, we had a great time with family and friends at the wedding. We stayed at the Riverdance Lodge, which you really must check out via their website to appreciate. It’s a ridiculously posh vacation home which happens to be right next door to the house that Andrew & Heather were borrowing for the wedding. So, our family rented it to stay for a couple days. Fantastic choice.

I’ve got a whole set of photos on Flickr from the rehearsal and before and after the wedding, and it’s really hard to decide which ones to show here, so I’ll just give you one of them and you can go visit the set. In this particular pic, Andrew and Heather were kinda bored during the photo shoot and gave me this little pose:

Such fun. There’s one more I’d post, but somehow I didn’t get it uploaded to Flickr yet. I’ll make a separate post for that one picture – how often can you say you have a guy relieving himself against a tree in the background of a wedding picture?

The wedding was beautiful and went about as smoothly as any wedding I’ve ever been to. I played the piano, Ryan sang, Laura and Addie were beautiful flower girls. They also had a lot of fun dancing afterwards. What a fantastic time of celebration.

After arriving late on Monday and having vehicle difficulty, we took the new minivan out to the Washington coast to spend a couple of days at the beach. We encountered several of these signs along the way… not something we typically see back home in Iowa.

The three-hour drive to the appropriately-named Long Beach brought us from temperatures in the upper 70’s in the Seattle area to 60 degrees, fog, and 30 mph winds in Long Beach. Yowza! We were glad we had remembered to pack jackets. We stayed at the Lighthouse Oceanfront Resort as part of a little deal where I created them a new website. We had a two-bedroom condo that, when the fog was out, provided us a view of the Pacific from our deck. The girls had much fun on the beach even in the cold; Laura found a real live clam, which stayed real and live until it had set in our minivan for a day, at which point it became real and very ripe. To spend actual time in the water, though, we enjoyed the heated pool at the resort.

The second day we ventured out to check out one of the nearby lighthouses. We tried to figure out how to reach the lighthouse on Cape Disappointment, but couldn’t figure out which road to take. So instead we visited the North Head Lighthouse, and while we couldn’t tour it (no children under 7 allowed on the tour), we still had a nice little walk and got some nice pictures of the lighthouse and the coast. Apparently the North Head Lighthouse records some of the strongest winds along the Pacific coast. We didn’t quite blow away, but it was seriously breezy.

Having traveled to the coast, the one thing Becky really wanted to eat was seafood. We did a little research and tried out a couple of different places that appeared to be somewhat family-friendly and within our budget. My conclusion is that seafood places in tourist towns must plan to sell you overpriced seafood and then make up for it with terrible service. The first night we tried a place called Doogers, and while my food was decent, the server totally forgot to bring me the Diet Pepsi I ordered. Becky’s combination platter was completely missing one of its major elements, a fact which wasn’t brought to light until Becky decided to ask for help identifying each of the elements on the platter. They went ahead and cooked up a razor clam and brought it out to her at the end of the meal, but still, come on, folks. The second night we tried The Crab Pot, supposedly a local favorite since 1946. We thought that surely it would be an improvement over Doogers. No such luck. Higher prices, poorer food, and incredibly awful service.

Still, though, we found a local bakery that was fantastic, and overall very much enjoyed ourselves in Long Beach. It would have been fun to have another day to spend traipsing around, but our schedule called us to move on. Next up: Yakima, en route to Leavenworth.

Note: I’m putting all the pics from the trip in this set on Flickr. There are far more than what I’m going to post on the blog. Grandparents will want to visit the link to see all the pics.

A couple of pics of our minivan’s flat tire the other night. Less dramatic because the guys already had the van jacked up. The thing was totally flat.

With the expense of airline travel these days, we thought we might consider a method of cost-reduction for this trip.

Laura demonstrates the proper way to pack the bag:

She feels pretty safe since she’s just a bit to big to fit into that bag.

Seattle here we come!

It’s been a weird year for weather here in Iowa. We started with the snowiest winter on record. Once that melted, we had an unusually cool spring. Now we’re finishing up spring and headed toward summer, and the rain has been nearly unstoppable. Seems like every day is another thunderstorm, bringing an inch (or two) (or three) of rain.

Now the flooding has begun. Already three of the bridges crossing the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids have been closed because the river has reached (or nearly reached) the bottom of the bridge. Mandatory evacuations have been declared for low-lying areas of town. A flood totally took out the railroad bridge up in Cedar Falls. They’ve got a fully-loaded train sitting on our railroad bridge here in Cedar Rapids to try and keep it from being swept away, too. (This picture is of a different bridge in CR.)

A lot of the low-lying areas are well known for flooding, but this one (near Ellis Park on the SW side of CR) is still stunning:

And there’s rain on the way again this morning. And tonight. And tomorrow. It’s gonna get better before it gets worse. Now, friends, fortunately our house is far away from the river, and on high ground; we’re in no danger of flooding; however, we have friends and co-workers who are currently in the process of sandbagging, packing up, and evacuating. Let’s pray that this rain stops, very soon.

[The pictures above are from the KCRG-TV website's YouNews page. There are a lot more pictures there if you're interested.]