The Mission

The last day of our trip we were going to be driving to St George in the afternoon so we wanted to do something easy and low key in the morning. While others went to Sea World, we decided to go check of The Mission. 

It was cool find out that this was the first, and thus oldest Mission in California. It was very pretty and peaceful and the perfect little outing before our drive home. 

Olive really loved smelling all of the flowers in the garden. 

Here she is making a wish. It is tricky throwing your coin in backwards. 

Olive loved all the fountains and wanted to keep making more and more wishes. 

This is proof that Milo was there as he just rode along in the stroller. 

It turned out to be the perfect, low key, easy outing that we wanted before we were going to be stuck in the car all afternoon. Good way to end a really magical and perfect trip. 

They Day We Went Surfing

We saw that there was a Surf Academy that you could sign up for through the hotel. As we were standing in line to see the pandas at the zoo we were asking all the older girls if they would want to do that. Then some of the dads said they thought that it would be fun to go with their girls and learn how to surf. I mean, once in a life time chance right? So Scott decided that he wanted to go with Taylor and the girls. As we were walking I was saying to Scott how someday, when our kids are older, it will be so cool when we can all go as a family and learn how to surf. That will be so cool. I was just thinking about the future you know, of having older kids that can do cool things like this. That's when Christine asked me if I wanted to go with everyone. I was like, "Yeah for sure but how will we do that with our little ones?" That's when Christine and Becca were like "We will watch them no problem!" That is actually the shortened version of the story, but now you know how we got so lucky to have such cool family that will watch our kids so we could go to surfing academy together. And boy was it worth it. I would say that this day was definitely a high light of the trip for me.  

When we got up and to the dock it was cold and over cast and I was sure that this was going to be freezing and thus miserable. Here we are wrapped up in blankets riding the water taxi over to the  Mission Beach Aquatics Center. 

After a quick lesson about the water and tides and ocean life that we might encounter we headed out to get suited up. Turns out, we did see dolphins and a seal swam past us about 20 feet away so their lesson was quite handy. 

Suited up and ready to go!

The worst part of the whole thing was doing the swim test right off the dock. It was so cold that it took your breath away when you jumped in which made it hard to swim after that. But we all passed. 

Oh yeah! We were so excited. 

Hang ten!!

After a little bit of instruction we all headed out. Everyone had a great time. My goal was to stand up once and I did. Once. But thankfully my one and only time I got to my feet happened to be documented. Luckily everyone who wasn't surfing found us so they all got to watch us surf. Olive loved playing in the sand with the kids, I don't think she noticed us out in the water. The big girls all did amazingly well and stood up multiple times. It is harder than I thought but in some ways easier. I wished that we had one more hour or another day to do it because I think we would have really gotten it down. Scott did awesome and got standing lots of times. It was really easy to catch the wave and get up on my  knees, but popping up to standing was another story. Such a fun day!! We carried or boards back and my arm was dying by the time we reached to dock but it was so worth it. I think in another life I could have been a surfer. 

Legoland

We were sSO excited to go to Legoland even though Olive doesn't really know anything about legos. It was totally the perfect place for our age kids. This was such a fun day. 

If you can't tell they are making "L"s to cheer.

We started off with some cute rides that we perfect for little kids.  This was a fairy tale ride made of all legos. 

Olive liked shooting these alligators and frogs. It was pretty cute. There were lots of little water feature things that were interactive all throughout the park. So they got to play on them in between rides. 

This cool fountain played music. If you jumped on the circle in front of the instrument then it started playing. We played with this for quite awhile. 

They had this amazing playground and we had a hard time pulling our kids away from it. Olive LOVED playing in the house. 

But she also made friends at the doctor office. 

Milo liked driving all the vehicles and pushing buttons in the fire station. 

All the "things" made of of legos was pretty amazing. Here is Olive (and another person's baby) by Hagrid and Harry. 

Hi Harry!

We all liked the Star Wars things. 

We obviously haven't done our parently duty to teach Olive about Star Wars because when she saw this statue she said "Who's this beautiful princess girl?" while petting her. 

Olive making the same face as the fish at a Star Wars scene.

It was really incredible these whole cities that they recreated out of legos. 

In front of lego NYC

They had these boats that you could steer and we did this for quite a long time, especially considering that Olive's boat just went round and round in circles. 

Olive liked this little knight ride. 

Isn't she adorable? The funnest ride was one where we all rode together on different police and fire trucks to put spray water at a fire. It was a race against the other trucks. It probably makes no sense unless you see it. But because we kept riding it I didn't take any pictures. It was hilarious because of course all the adults on the different trucks got all competitive

Love these two!

Olive got her first ever lego set of a Cinderella and prince castle. She was SO excited to put it together and has loved playing with it. She loved legos now. It's about time they figured out to have fun stuff for girls too. It was the cutest thing how Olive and Scott sat down to build her lego castle. They were both so into it.

A Day at the Beach

The next day we hung out and played all day at the beach. It was pretty much the perfect day.

The water was pretty darn cold but that didn't stop the kids. They spent hours looking for jellyfish and other ocean life. They found like 10 jellyfish. Olive came walking over to us with this goopy looking thing in her hand until we realized it was a jellyfish. The big girls caught a little turtle. They were quite excited about that. 

I found this swim cap at Target on super clearance for $2 so I thought Olive might get a kick out of it. This girl loves accessories. She wore it every time she put on her swim suit. She would say "Mom! I need my swimming hat!" Crazy girl. 

Yep, I actually got to do this. It was amazing. 

One of the highlights of the whole trip was flying kites. Most of the kids got kites for Easter and this little cove was the absolute perfect place to get them up. Don't worry, Scott got himself one too. He's such a kid at heart. He was so excited to help Olive fly a kite for the first time. It was pretty impressive because they got it up and then flew it for like 40 minutes. 

I think this is the coolest shot. Thanks for Scott willing to get down and dirty on the ground for it!

Proud girl! Something about this picture makes my heart melt. It also makes my heart break a little bit because that looks like such a big girl flying her own kite. 

I didn't get a picture of it because it was getting late and dark but remember how I said Scott got himself a kite? Well, he also got an extra long string extender. It started out seeing how long he could let his kite out. Then, he started adding other people's kite strings to it. I think he made it up to like 4 or 5 kite's strings. Needless to say he got that kite up there really high, like, you almost couldn't see it anymore. All the boys were so excited and kept trying to add random things onto the string and send it up the line. I guess they never grow out of being boys. 

These two had fun playing in the sand and the big girls loved following them around and taking care of them. It's pretty awesome actually. 

We let the kids stay up late and have smores by the fire. Olive absolutely loved it other than she had to wear my sunglasses because the smoke kept hurting her eyes, poor girl. She looked like such a diva sitting on daddy's lap with huge sunglasses on. We adults stayed up way too late playing cards at our bungalow. I think Scott won BS like 4 times in a row before we gave up.