Labor Day Weekend in California

This weekend is a big holiday in the US - Labor Day. We took our one last quick jaunt down to California before the kids start school and headed to our family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Our family has a condo with a deep water dock, as they are in the process of restoring a boat so that they can go out on the high seas. Right now the boat is beautiful on the outside but needs some finishing on the inside. They have christened it 'the Rubber Ducky' and it is going to sail in a couple of years.

We drove down on Friday, and Saturday we swam and played around their condo. It was HOT.
Sunday we braved BART and rode into the city. The Bay Bridge was closed for repairs and so everyone else was riding BART too - it was crowded! We went to China town. I had always wanted to go, and I needed Moon Cakes in order to celebrate the Autumn Festival. I've been mulling over September in general in my mind, as we are also coming up on the one year anniversary of getting Emma. Anyway, I suspect we'll have a joint celebration of the Autumn Festival and the deay Emma came to be with us. Although it was a terrific day for us, it was a pretty hard sad day for her so celebrating the AF seems smart. Basically AF is a time for families, where everyone goes out and looks at the full moon and thinks of their loved ones. It seems appropriate somehow.
While we were in Chinatown we stumbled across a playground just off on the corner. We stopped to let the kids run off some steam. The playground was full of asian kids, and one woman approached me. She was from China and had adopted her 7 year old from China 5 years ago. She was having nice memories of her own child watching Emma play.
We had some other excitement this weekend as well. We have noticed over the last year that Emma has trouble with how dry our climate is compared to China. This weekend we went somewhere even drier, and boy did she let us know. When Emma hits a dry warm climate, she gets nosebleeds. Not just any old nosebleeds either, but big scary ones at night. They wake her up and she feels like she is in some kind of terrible horror movie. We had one every day we were in California, and our poor family had more sheets to wash then I would have ever imagined. Of course the poor cousins we were staying with had never seen anything like it either, so we'd have 5 kids in our room, one covered in blood and 4 looking scared or crying. Weee.
Other then that our trip was fantastic!
Here are some pics of the weekend for your enjoyment...