A Few New Things

The posts are piling up—we’ve gone on several adventures and the house is mostly—although not entirely—put together, and you haven’t really seen any of it yet!  My deepest apologies.  I’ll do my best to remedy that very soon.

                           
First, to prove to you that our house is no longer a big, empty box, I give you: furniture!  Perfect for sitting down to watch VeggieTales and even more perfect for early morning reading sessions.

A sneak peek of our new dining room furniture.  We upgraded (via a yardsale website) to a table that will allow us to seat guests.

Also in the realm of new things, new pedicure!  Okay, so it’s not up to the artwork quality of Cocok’s (in Okinawa) but I think it’s decent considering I did it myself.  You’re at least a little impressed, right?  Or are you just tired of seeing pictures of my weird-looking toes?

But now for the really important stuff . . . 

1, 2, 3, off we go!  It was really just that quick.  It’s smooth sailing once he gets started; he’s still not quite comfortable hopping on to the bike and pushing himself off but we’re working on that part.

Dang it, he really is growing up, isn’t he?

                             
Not to be outdone, Naomi has perfected the scooter push (it’s the three-wheeled variety) and continues to excel in climbing all manner of things.

Birthday Corral

Another neighborhood birthday party.  This one was rather more elaborate than Naomi’s super-simple cookie “party”, but you know what?  I’m perfectly okay with that!  It was lots of fun.

                                 
My little cowboy and cowgirl, all decked out in their party gear.

         
There was a pony ride and a petting zoo!

                
       
All of this was hosted right here in our neighborhood, on the grassy area between the post boxes and the playground.
                             A cupcake, apparently, will turn even the cutest among us into a bearded bad guy.

Logan practices a John Wayne scowl, prepping for the long ride home.

Eureka!

You’ll be glad to know that there appear to be a few playgrounds in California that are worth exploring, even if they don’t have roller slides.  We found the first of what are sure to be many, tucked away between some stores and offices off the main road through town.
Bonito Canyon park proved to be as pretty as its name, with this play area, a baseball field and an ocean view.

 
Sand to dig in and motorcycles to ride make for lots of fun.

                         
The trade-off that American playgrounds all seem to have in place of roller slides is a swing set.  Whether it’s lack of experience or just general kid-ness, but they could spend all morning on the swings I think, provided Mommy was willing to keep pushing them that long.  (Logan is getting better at pumping, but hasn’t fully mastered it yet.  Plus, he likes underdogs.  You remember those, right?)

SeaLife=Underwater Legos

I’m really not sure who decided it would be a good idea to put a bunch of Legos inside some fish tanks, but they did and they built SeaLife Aquarium right next to the Legoland park.  It was a lot of fun though and a great, fairly simple outing.

  
The best thing about this aquarium, as opposed to the very many others that we’ve been to by now, is that there are A LOT of interactive and immersive features.

And it’s extremely colorful.  You can tell that an inordinate amount of attention went into the aesthetics of this place, to the point really, where I think things were chosen and arranged for their aesthetic value far more than for their educational value, but that’s okay I suppose.  As I said earlier, it was certainly fun!


Some of the particularly interesting elements included the “sand” castle that the kids could add on to (Legos of course) and the diver show where kids could talk back and forth with the divers in the tank, asking them questions like “how many different kinds of fish are in the tank?” and “are you scared being in there with sharks?”

A small snack to finish up the outing.

             
When we got home it became apparent that baby needed a snack too.  Say ah, baby!

Thanks for your help Logan.  

2 Years, 3 Weeks

In other words, there’s been a bit of a delay between Naomi’s birthday and this post.  But she’s pretty spectacular and ought to be celebrated, even if it is a bit late. 

      We kept things super-simple for her birthday “party” this year.  All we did was bring cookies out to the cul-de-sac when everybody was running around in the afternoon.  The normal gang consists of 12 kids between 18 months and 5 years, so it was probably the biggest party we’ve thrown for either of the kids so far!

              

We went to the Legoland aquarium in the morning—that will be coming up in the next post.  Birthday hugs from Logan and a little more cheese for the camera rounded out the day.  Happy birthday Sunshine!

Trestles

A gray day in southern California and we decide to go to the beach, go figure!  But it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, just to sit and watch the surfers.  It really was quite pleasant.  And since this was our first really good view of Trestles (the beach right by our house), it will be your first view as well.

The bridge that replaced the old trestle bridge; if you look closely you can see that they’ve spelled out “Trestles”, one letter per column, on the new bridge.

                            
Two views from the beach looking back.

No idea who this girl was, but she was practicing her cartwheels in earnest for probably 20 minutes.

                         
We didn’t practice cartwheels, not this time.  In fact, Logan appears too be a bit confused by the whole thing.

Very course sand. 

But the real attraction, without question . . .


   

Inspired, Jake tries some of his own stunts on the way home.