California

Since this is the first year that spring break has meant something to the whole family, we decided to do something with it! So we headed to California to visit the Hobsons.

We started out the vacation by leaving the kids with a babysitter and going out on a date with Mark and Shannah! Yay for date night! We had some fabulous Mexican food at El Adobe, which was apparently President Nixon's favorite restaurant.

The next day we took the kids out to explore the tide pools. We have been learning about the ocean in preschool, so they loved finding some of the animals we've been talking about.

These were the biggest star fish I have ever seen and there were quite a few of them!

(No, we didn't touch the animals, that's not allowed! Shhhh...)

We also found tons of crabs and anemones, but since this post already has a ton of pictures, we will skip those.

(Yes, I am a big wimp and getting up on this rock totally freaked me out.)

The next day, we finally went to the beach! Jacob has never played at the beach before, so it's been my goal to go since we got married. Emily and Edward were both completely terrified of the ocean, so we didn't actually do much swimming. Eddie was good with the water until a wave knocked him over and then he ran away screaming. I carried Emily in kicking and screaming and did my best to convince her that it wasn't scary. She agreed with me that it wasn't scary and I thought I was getting somewhere. Then I realized that she was only agreeing to get me to let her go. So, we enjoyed the sand!

Emily and Jacob (mostly Jacob) had lots of fun building a sand castle.

We also walked down the pier, stopping every 30 seconds for Eddie to put his flip-flop back on.

When it was time to go, the sand castle was flooded.

And hit by a sand storm.

We decided to engage in touristiness and ate at this cafe on the beach. The food was decent and it was fun to soak up some more sun and watch the water while we ate!

William was not a happy camper during the night while we were there, spending a good deal of time screaming at Mom each night. So when he crashed Tuesday morning, I was not about to wake him up. We had a slow morning waiting for him to wake up and decided to head to the park when he did. We found a super fun park near by and the kids could have played all day! There was a pirate ship and a castle and swings, happiness for all three kiddos.

And of course, we had lots of fun playing with friends!