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...

Woo Hoo, Gotta Love Air Miles!

Well today on my lunch break I took a chance and called the air miles partner desk to take my first stab at next year's vacation. DH and I have it worked out that we charge everything to our air miles VISA, and every few years we can go somewhere really fun. A few years back it was Italy. This time its off to the United Kingdom! Believe it or not, I got tickets on the first try. We have 3 weeks in Europe, and I even got weekend flights to boot!
So now the fun planning begins. I stopped by the library today and picked up some travel guides. We go in and out of Heathrow, but what we do for the 3 weeks is up to us. I suspect we'll try to spend the last week in London proper and rent an apartment. Now that we are a family of 5 apartments often make more sense then hotels. Most hotels can't accomodate us quite frankly.
I think we'll probably get a britrail pass and take the train most everywhere. It is so much easier then lugging car seats around and trying to find rental cars that are large enough to accomodate us.
If you are reading this and you have an opinion, what should we do with our 3 weeks? Leave me comments or send me an email :)
Speaking of vacations, tomorrow the house sitter comes and we are off to a week on the ocean. I'm not sure what internet access will look like from there, as it is a small town without much in the way of cell service and what not. I'll post if I can. This will be both Emma and Boo's first time to see an ocean. It should be a kick!
Happy blogging everyone and a Happy 4th of July!

North for Father's Day

For Father's Day this year DH decided he wanted to head north to Seattle. Seattle is really one of our favorite cities, and we try to sneak up there once or twice a year when we have a long weekend.
Initially we envisioned this as a train ride, but after assessing what it would be like for me to carry all the luggage and manage children while dh was recovering from shoulder surgery, we opted for the 4 runner instead. After a liesurely ride up to Portland and a couple toy store stops (Hannah Anderssen for me, Fry's for him) we made it to Seattle. Friday we were up early, and we ate breakfast at the hotel before setting off on foot. Our destiation initially was the zoo, but after checking our weather reports we opted instead to hoof it up to the Seattle Center. It wasn't far, probably a little over half a mile, and we were there.
We were a hair early, so we went into the food court area to wait for things to open. At 9:30 am there isn't much happening there, except for an occassional transient trying to keep warm and catch a nap. We had some starbucks before heading down to the Children's Museum.
The Seattle Children's Museum is wonderful. The kids played nonstop for several hours. It was so much fun to watch Emma try to do everything her sibs were doing, laughing the whole time. We dressed up, they made food for us, they assembled and dissassembled things. It was grand.
We went upstairs and boy had the room changed while we were gone. By 12:30 the food court was jam-packed with people of all shapes and sizes. We finally found a filthy table and cleared it off enough to eat. It was fun to watch the crowds. Seattle is so much more diverse then our hometown. For the first time in a while I felt like we didn't stick out a bit. I think the oddest sensation was that when I saw an asian child they most often had an asian parent of two. In our town, most asian children are adopted and so you rarely see a parent of the same race.
So after lunch we headed over to DH's favorite playground, the Science Center. We saw a movie about Lewis and Clark at the omnimax theater before we went to play in the exhibits. The center has a terrific dinosaur fossil exhibit right now. We looked at fossilized eggs, and lots of great dino skeltons. Jakey was in heaven.
We ended up at the water play area. Jakey and Vi are actually about an inch too tall to go in there, but we snuck in anyway. Emma succeeded in dousing herself with water and we couldn't really get her rung out. We decided it was probably time to head out, so off we went.
I stopped at a cute little store next to the Children's theater and bought a few books. They had some really gorgeous fairy books, and of course the colorful sheep book that went with the dramatic performance going on at the Children's museum.
DH dug out garmin and we headed out for a grocery store. Safeway looks different in Portland, it has its own parking structure! After picking up supplies we headed back to our hotel and ordered italian in for the night.
Saturday was a public transit day. We found the bus and rode it all the way out to Woodland Park Zoo. The Zoo there is so nice - the critters aren't caged up in miserable spaces and are allowed to inhabit habitats more like they would have in nature. Its always a pleasant experience, and due to the big solstice celebration in Fremont District no one was there until much later!
We rode the bus back downtown and got off near Pike's Market. We walked down a LOT of stairs (carrying Emma who didn't want to walk much) and ended up at the Seattle Aquarium. The kids had a good time watching the sea otters eat abalone, and looking at baby salmons.
We ate dinner outside, which was a mistake. A cold wind was coming in and we almost froze sitting on the deck looking at the sailboats As usual the food was terrific, but we ate quickly and scurried back to the bus and our hotel.
Today we hit the Boeing Space Museum along with hundreds of other families to see the new space exhibit. It was great - they had a mock-up of the space station and lot sof lunar landing stuff. I think Em didn't get much out of it, but the rest of us were thrilled. It always makes me smile and think of my Dad too, when I get around the old planes. There was one vet from WWII there, and it reminded me of how much he also loved to fly. I hope at some level one of the kids gets that love. It was such a part of who my Dad was, and he never got to share it with them.
More later, its late, and I'm pooped!