Wednesday, April 15, 2015

The Rest of Our CA Adventure!

We stayed at Poppie and Nonnie's house for almost 2 weeks during our February CA Disneyland vacation. Buggy and Uncle Kookie live with them too, so were able to hang out together, go to Sno2Go, In and Out and have other California treats. Nonnie made Opal a birthday cake on her actual birthday which was just the next day, after Disney. 

The kids had fun watching movies, playing in the empty pool in the backyard, slack-lineing, going on walks, visiting Buggy's work, and playing with the funny photo feature on the iPad:
Uncle Kookie found a kid friendly climbing gym where the kids all had a great time climbing and repelling from fun walls while attached to an auto belay.

While everyone was climbing, I stayed with Tuffy and had a photo shoot. I took all of these pictures while Tuff was sitting on my lap.
Then I finally made his birth announcement! Not that I actually printed them or mailed any out. But hey, he's the seventh kid and I actually made him an announcement. That's something! Ok. Fine. He was already 2 months old and everyone already knew he was born, but it's the principle of the thing. He'll know, now, that he indeed had a birth announcement. (If you're reading this in the future, Tuff, I love you, see I made you this birth announcement. Don't try looking for your baby book though. You won't find one.)

The kid's also loved playing with the fake snowballs Nonnie made, and her Fisher Price dollhouse was a big hit with Kivi. She played it everyday and sweet Buggy usually joined her when she got home from work. We had a great time going to my Aunt Sherri's house - she wasn't there, which was the sad part, but we still had fun in her hot tub, swimming in her community pool and hanging out in her media room and eating her candy. Actually, when we got home the kids had to write about our CA trip and Eben's whole paper was about Aunt Sherri's media room - not Disneyland!
We decided to take the scenic route back home and drive the 101. We found Mrs. Grossman's Sticker Factory on the internet on the way there and called for a tour appointment. Before our tour started we stopped at a Starbucks so I could feed Tuffy and the kids walked with Dada on a scenic trail along a creek. He helped them build a dam, which they were even more excited about that than the stickers. It was a very interesting tour seeing how the stickers were designed, and watching all the machines necessary to make them. At each different machine our tour guide would hand us each a bunch of stickers. At the end of the tour, the kids got to make a sticker craft.
We drove through the Avenue of the Giants, not through a tree, our van was too huge. But we got to walk through some! On our way home we stopped for the night at my Aunt Jan's new, beautiful home in OR. She had the hugest meal ready for us when we got there, around 9:30pm - enchiladas, beans, rice, tacos - it was good! And in the morning she made us every type of breakfast food imaginable. The kids loved it. I make one thing and everyone has to eat it. But she whipped up delicious eggs, yogurt, french toast, bacon, sausage and cereals.  I'm sure we ate through a months worth of their food! It was a great ending to fantastic vacation.



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