June Vacation and stuff

This is going to be a picture-heavy, less wordy blog post than normal…but let’s face it, after that 12 page essay I wrote about my New York travel experience, I doubt you all are going to be crying about less words to read. And just a heads up that these are in no way the best pictures from our trip, but I feel like they give a pretty good representation of what we were doing during our trip...

So let’s get to it…last week we drove down to Yuma, AZ (about a 10 hour drive) for a few days to visit with Michaela’s family and celebrate her birthday down there. She turned 31 on June 2nd and is now two years older than I am…sheesh! Yes, I love to remind her about this for two months out of every year.

We had a great time in Yuma, getting to hang with all of our Yuma Cousins as well as “Molly Mac Mac Mac” and Grayson a little bit…Landon even got to hold Grayson’s baby sister Colbie, which was really cute…he was very excited about it as he doesn’t have a lot of experience around babies.

The weather was absolutely beautiful in Yuma so we managed to hit up Laura and Tim’s pool on several occasions, where Landon was quick to learn how to jump off the diving board all by himself. By the end of our trip we had to watch him extra carefully as he would just jump in without anyone being prepared and then swim to the side…he does still use the floaties, but his lack of fear of the water was making us very cautious.

On Tuesday we piled in the car and headed out to San Diego for the second leg of the trip. While in San Diego we stayed at a great little beach house which was literally within 30 yards of Pacific Beach (a big "Thank You!" to Nana and Papa Steve for that one!), so we spent quite a bit of time in the sand and surf. The water was very cold, but Landon really enjoyed jumping waves with his parents, and we walked up and down the beach each morning collecting sea shells. Michaela and I even managed several decent runs around the area, which was great (and a first for me on vacation).

On Thursday we headed over to Sea World for the day, where we met up with Ramsey/Becca/Grayson/Molly. The kids had a great time checking out all the shows and exhibits…I think our favorite was the Sea Lion and Otter show. Landon spotted a plastic sword early on in the day and from that point on it was all about “can I get the sword now?” to which we eventually conceded…After that all he wanted to do was plunge the sword into every shrub and bush in the park…boys!

While in San Diego, we also got to see Michaela’s cousin Ryan, who drove down from LA to spend a few days with us. Landon really loved hanging with “Uncle Ryan” and even managed to ride on Ryan’s electric skateboard with him…

Landon also coined the phrase “Surf’s up Dude!” while walking around the beach and talking to some of the many surfers that were there.

The drive home was long and uneventful and now we’re doing our best to get back into the daily grind.

This week also marked Landon’s first week at his new school, as we switched him over to a Montessori school. So far the transition has gone pretty well, as long as you don’t count the morning drop off (which has been a total disaster). Each morning I take him in to school and we end up being the first ones there as I have to get to work. Landon doesn’t know the new teachers all that well yet, so he cries and screams and fights to get to me as I walk out the door…it’s really heart-breaking, and I wish I could stay and play with him all day…but unfortunately us adults have to go to work and all. Anyhow, I know that this will pass and soon he’ll be having me drop him off at the corner so his friends don’t see, but for now, these last few days have been tough.

Developmentally though, Landon’s been doing great. One thing that we noticed this week is that his imagination is becoming much more developed now, and he’ll go and play by himself with his toys for long periods of time, whereas in the past he used to always have one of us play with him…again, we better make sure we get in our playing time with him now, as he won’t want to play with us forever unfortunately.

Anyhow, I said this wouldn’t be too wordy, so I’ll leave it here…hope you enjoy the pictures! If we can figure out how to do it, we'll load them all up online on flicker or picasa or something...there are a ton of good ones and this is just scratching the surface...