from SoCal to NorCal

After our week at the beach house, I figured I may as well make the short drive up to the bay area to extend our vacay and stay out of the AZ heat as long as possible!

Randy had to get back to work, of course, so we dropped him off at LAX to fly back home to Arizona, and me and my boys drove up my parents.

My mom always has a never ending list of fun things to take the grandkids to do in the bay area, so our week was jam packed with fun!

And when we weren't off on our daily adventures, the boys had fun exploring and playing in grandma and grandpas backyard...they helped water the plants everyday, rode around in Roman's jeep, played in the sandbox, looked for deer and wild turkeys, and played some pretty intense games of hide and seek.

MONDAY:

On Monday, we spent the day in the city, visiting all the places I used to visit with my family when I was a little girl. Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf, Ghiradelli Square, Lombard Street.  After people watching for about 15 minutes on The Embarcadero Madden said, "this is a weird city..."

TUESDAY:

On Tuesday we drove out to Danville to meet up with some of our AZ friends that moved to California last year.  We went swimming and played and ate lunch.  (which sadly, I took no pictures of).  And then when we got back to my parents, we left Beck at home with Grandma while Madden and I went to the movies to see The Shallows.  He had been watching Shark Week on the Discovery channel at my parents house and really wanted to see it. I was worried it might be too scary for him, but he loved it!

WEDNESDAY:

On Wednesday, we met up with a bunch of our Concord 2nd ward friends at the Jelly Belly Factory.  I loved coming to this place when I was a little kid!  And the boys loved it!  After our tour at the Jelly Belly factory, my mom took us to lunch at this AMAZING place in Napa called Oxbow Market.  Its basically a huge, fancy, gourmet food court.  The boys ate a delicious pizza (that I couldn't stop stealing bites from, it was so good!) and my mom and I had crab tacos!  YUM!

THURSDAY:

On Thursday, we drove out to Monterey to take the boys to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  Another bay area fave of mine and another place that holds so many childhood memories for me.  We ate lunch at Cindy's Waterfront with a beautiful ocean view right outside our window.  Each table had a pair of binoculars on it so you could search out the window for sea life.  Beckett kept looking through the binoculars and yelling, "I SEE NEMO!"  The boys loved the aquarium!  Madden's favorite was the giant tank with the hammerhead sharks, my favorite was the jellyfish exhibit, and Beckett's favorite was the tank with Nemo and Dory in it, of course ;)  On our way home from the aquarium, we drove out to Livermore to have dinner with my grandpa and grandma Graham and visit with them.  Beckett had fun playing with all of Grandma's little decorations everywhere (lol) and Madden had fun looking through her finger puppets and old teaching materials.  She sent us home with bags full of stuff for the boys, of course :)

FRIDAY:

On Friday, Josie and Roman joined us and we took the kids to the Lindsay Wildlife Museum.  Beckett was a PILL while we were there and we had already had such a long, exhausting week that at this point I was pretty much done being a single mom.  Which was perfect timing, because that night DADDY flew in!  Madden was so excited that he stayed up super late to drive out to the airport and pick him up with me.  

SATURDAY:

On Saturday, we drove out to Berkley and had a delicious lunch at the Cheeseboard.  Best.pizza.EVER.  Then we drove over to Codornices Park to ride the giant cement slide over and over and over again.  The boys couldn't get enough of it!  It was sunny and 64 degrees outside and DADDY was here, so pretty much anything we did that day would have been great!  That night, we had dinner at our fave, Fentons, before heading over to the A's game with my parents.  It was their pyro-spectacular game, since it was the weekend of the 4th of July.  I LOVED going to those games when I was a kid!  We went every year and its always been one of the best firework shows I've ever seen!  After freezing our BUNS off through the game and suffering through a couple extra innings, they finally started to blare Journey's "When the lights go down in the city..." over the speakers and the fireworks FINALLY started!  And lets be real, thats all the kids came for!

The next morning we woke up bright and early, said goodbye to my parents, and took off on our 11 hour road trip home.  We were dreading it, but it actually went pretty smoothly and pretty fast.  And just towards the end, when Beckett was starting to lose it, Great Grandma Grahams "quiet book" came to the rescue! 

2 straight weeks of vacay was fun, but it feels good to be back home...