Every year, we try to spend a weekend in the Seattle area visiting friends and family, and getting to know our sister city. This year, we discovered an Airbnb that will probably become a family tradition. Here’s what it looked like when we arrived:

No trip to Seattle is complete without a visit to the Seattle Center. We haven’t actually gone up to the top of the Space Needle with them yet, but they like walking around the bottom of it.

We wanted to spend an entire day getting to know the very cool Children’s Museum. So we did.

Will and Lucy both decided that Lucy should be Baby Bear, so Will took the picture.

Yeah, that’s Becky helping the kids build a cardboard-box fort.

Lucy’s been wanting to do monkey bars for quite a while. She takes every opportunity to practice, and she’s so close.

They made us all sorts of imaginary food.

The theater, with its well-stocked dress-up cabinet, is always a hit.

My turn! We built a sturdy box with bolts and wingnuts.

Then we climbed a mountain.

And went sailing around the world.

We ended the day with this, though it was only 65°, so we couldn’t let them get soaked.

[Continued: see part two!]