California Trip

So we just got home from a fabulous vacation to California to visit my family! We had such a blast and are SO grateful that we got to spend time with all of our family and have such a fun break!

We started off with a visit to my brother Billy and his wonderful wife Jen and their new baby Britta! She is So so so adorable and I got to take some fun pictures of her before we left. My camera is acting up and having a really hard time focusing (auto AND manual focus) so a lot of my pictures were SUPER blury!

The kids LOVED holding her (thanks for being such a good sport Jen!) and were SO excited to get to meet her!

The kids had sleepovers with their cousins every night and spent ALL DAY every day in the pool! We went to dinner with all of my family and shopping with the girls and even went to the water park one day! Unfortunately on THAT day, my iPhone was stolen! Peter had been trying to convince me that I needed an iPhone since he got his and recently he's been trying even HARDER because he wanted to "upgrade" and give me the old one! Well, he succeeded and he picked up his NEW iPhone the day before we left for California and I spent the whole drive down programing in my contacts and playing "Tap Tap Revenge" (dance dance revolution for the iPhone) and tinkering with all of the other fun applications on it. Well! I ordered a cute pink cover for it and it came to my parents house and I put it on and had fallen in love... completely head over heals! And it got stollen! Grrr!! So I've been without a phone for almost a week and I didn't realize how hard it would be! Kind of a funy side note: our internet went down at home while we were gone and our home phones are set up through the internet. So all of the calls that came to our home phone while we were gone were forwarded on to my cell phone, but I guess it was my OLD cell number that they had it transfering to so everyone that called my home phone got some Hispanic man in California and everyone who called my cell phone got a message that said that "This number is not accepting calls"! And Peter's cell phone ran out of batteries on the way home and we don't have a car charger for it! So that's that!

Then on Firday we went down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and had such a great time! I hadn't been to the Aquarium since I was in fourth grade and I forgot how great it was! We spent the whole day there until they closed at 6. The kids had an absolute ball!

So we stayed at a hotel there in Monterey and woke up Saturday morning and drove up to a beach called Rio Del Mar (just south of Santa Cruz) and it was GORGEOUS! Such a great beach with some amazing beach houses right along part of it that you can rent out (definately looking into that for a future vacation) and the weather was PERFECT! So so nice, not too hot but warm enough to play in the water and not shiver and be freezing when you got out! The kids dug huge "hot tub" holes (actually Peter and Jason dug the holes and the kids played in them) and chased waves and had so much fun together. We set up our stuff pretty high up away from the waves, but we stayed so long that we had to move up 3 or 4 times because the tide was coming in and creeping closer and closer to our towels! One time my mom and Tara and Jen and I were all laying on our towels when all of the sudden we hear the boys yelling, "It's coming, it coming! Get up! Get up! GET UP!" We were washed up! The waves came right up under our towels and soaked everything, some of the beach toys got washed down shore a little ways too! crazy how high we had to go (we were even on the top of a little rise in the sand so we thought we'd be fine!). Anyway! It was such a great day!

We had so much fun visiting with family and meeting baby Britta! The kids miss thier cousins so much and had a huge emotional cry fest the night they had to say goodbye! We love you all so much! Thanks for being so wonderful and for the fun memories that we created this trip!! Looking forward to Disneyland in November!