I didn’t quite finish the post about our day at the beach. I forgot to mention what Poppa was doing with us at the beach. The following should have appeared before the final sentence about lunch and naps. While Jeff and I read books at the beginning of the morning, Pop was the entertainment for the kids. He got all of them involved in making sand castles that turned out to be sand Village People. Below is a picture of everyone’s hard work.
Tuesday, In Toby’s planning, she scheduled Tuesday and Thursday to be ‘stay home’ days. The men took the kids to the beach while the women got attended to at a local day spa.
Lucy told me that she wanted to stay buried ‘forever and ever’. Her actual burial time was about an hour. We saw a couple of dolphins and lots of helicopters. We had take out from Fidel’s for lunch and spent the afternoon swimming and reading and napping.
Monday — Wild Animal Park — It was tough getting out of the condo this morning, and we ended up being 20 minutes late to meet everyone else, but it worked out ok. They had a great Meerkat exhibit and Lucy loved it. The elephant show was fantastic, but I waited about 20 minutes for the food place to cook a hot dog for the kid’s meal I ordered. Ugh. Poppa, Jeff and I had a strenuous uphill walk to get to the elephant show where the gals were waiting for lunch. I had Lucy on my shoulders while balancing a tray full of food, including a large soda with no lid (for the safety of the animals). The hardest part was that having Lucy on my shoulders caused my hat to fall over my eyes and I didn’t have any free hands to push it back up. I ended up just keeping Jeff’s heels in sight and following them.
Sunday, At 7a, I woke up and got the kids out of the room so that Toby could sleep for a few more hours uninterrupted. We did a walking tour of Carlsbad for about 2 hours. We stopped for donuts and hot chocolate and Lucy promptly spilled all down the front of her little pink sweat suit. She really liked pushing the crosswalk buttons and really cried when she didn’t get to push it. On the way back, we went to Albertson’s and I got a couple of bags of groceries for our immediate breakfast needs. After lunch we went to Flower Fields and viewed some beautiful flowers. Max went sluicing for gems and discovered quite a few shiny rocks including a Tiger’s Eye, his new favorite.
Dinner time was at Tony Roma’s with Poppa and Yaya, Jan and Jeff and kids. Toby presented the picture book for Yaya and Yaya loved it.
Saturday: We started the week’s vacation by attending Ryan Theule’s wedding to Beth Kennedy. The ceremony was in Capistrano Beach and was directly on the way to our resort in Carlsbad. As we got on the freeway after the reception, Toby said that she would need to stop to use a restroom in about 15 minutes (why hadn’t she gone before we left?). Well, 15 minutes would have put us right in the middle of Camp Pendleton, so we had to get off the freeway right after we got on. We arrived at The Carlsbad Inn and checked into our room with no problems. We left almost immediately to have dinner with Doug and Gina Morse in San Marcos. Doug did a great job of finding a bunch of restaurants in the middle between his home of Escondido and Carlsbad. It was great to see them and they were off to Hawaii on Sunday. Max had seen the pool and so it was necessary for us to swim right away. After about 10 minutes in the pool with a bunch of older boys, Max was swimming exceedingly well. He was putting his face in the water and swimming the width of the pool without problems. The pool is nicely heated. They also have a jacuzzi that the kids can use. It was about 15 degrees warmer than the pool, but that was not very warm. It felt warm for about 2 minutes when entering after being in the main pool, but I quickly began shivering. At 9 pm the kids went to bed on the sofa bed with many dire warnings about not touching each other. It seems to have worked because they slept the whole night through.