Month: March 2010

Happy Birthday Uncle Andrew!

IMG_1107Uncle Andrew turned 30 this weekend!  And we got to celebrate with him!  For the past couple of months, Uncle Andrew has been coming to visit for a weekend every month for a class he’s taking.  This month his birthday happened to be while he was in California, so we got to celebrate.  The highlight of the celebrations was a surprise visit from Coleman.  Equally fun (for me at least) was getting our first babysitter so that we could go out to dinner in the city.  We had a great time but the weekend was over too fast (too fast to take pictures apparently because we don’t have a single one with the birthday boy)!

Arizona

IMG_1089Nick and I took our first flight (alone!!) to Arizona (pictures here).  We spent a fabulous week there getting to meet great grandma Dot, great aunt Jan and great uncle Gary and getting to see grandma Car Car, grandpa Sam, grandma Cheryl and aunt Emily.  We had such a great trip.  On average, Nick did pretty well on the plane — the flight out was horrible but he was perfect on the flight back.  We learned lots of things about traveling together and by the next time we go somewhere with Sam, he’ll be so impressed with how easy we make it look.  Luckily, nice people appear everywhere to help you when you’re traveling alone, otherwise we never would have made it through security! 

Highlights of the trip were the stories that great grandma told Nick, the private concert from Aunt Jan, our afternoon with the Tucson clan, making bread, and playing games during nap time!  We managed to pick the coldest, wettest week to visit, so we didn’t get a chance to go swimming, which was a bummer since we were dying to dress Nick up in the adorable swim outfit that grandma Cheryl brought him…I guess we’ll have to do that now that we’re back in sunny California.

First Ski Trip

IMG_0982We took Nick up to Tahoe for the first time this weekend (pictures here).  We all survived the 12 hour drive up in a storm, including a 1 hour stop on the pass with the car turned off and the road closed, and after a few hours sleep at the cabin we headed to the mountain.  We went to Northstar because they make it easier for families with their Parent Predicament passes and handy tow carts for all your gear — at least as easy as it can be with an army of 4 adults and 2 kids and all the gear that goes along with it. All 6 of us and our gear took a gondola up to the lodge at mid-mountain. Nick had about 1 sqare inch of space in his car seat on the floor of the gondola, but he didn’t complain. Needless to say, it took us a while to get up the mountain and get situated, so it was pretty late in the afternoon by the time we got out on the slopes and we each only got 4 or 5 runs in, but it was worth it! Nick was begging us to let him go skiing, but we decided to wait at least until he can stand on his own before we strap skis on him.  I really wanted to strap him into the front pack and ski down the easy run from the lodge to the bottom of the gondola at the end of the day (apparently this is how my dad took me skiing my first winter…) but we whoosed out in the end.  Next year…

Nick had such a good time hanging out in the lodge and at the cabin with his buddy, Kellen.  Kellen entertained us all in the evening with his silly toddler games, like swirling balls in a colinder and wearing pots and pans as helmets.  Despite the gruesome drive up, the rest of the trip was a blast.  We loved our weekend away with our extended friend family!

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