California Adventure: California Here We Come

In early May, we loaded the kids up in the car for a long road trip to California for my (baby!) sister's wedding.  A few overall reflections before jumping into the details...

1. Traveling within the same time zone is 100x easier than across time zones.  

2. For me, by far, the worst part of traveling and vacations is dealing with sleep issues.  Sleep is a big deal at our house and we try to be pretty structured and routine about it.  For obvious reasons, that's not usually possible when traveling.  It would be great to just not worry about it, but my kids are SOOO much happier, and kinder, and more obedient, and even-keel when they're well rested, that it's hard to "just let it go."

3. On the "sleep" topic... since Thane was almost two, we considered turning his car seat forward facing for the trip.  The clear benefit would be he would be able to see more.  We ultimately decided not to turn him, though, because we hoped he'd be taking his naps while driving and figured his rear-facing, reclining seat would be much more comfortable and conducive to good napping.  Thane heartily disagreed and refused to nap in the car, regardless of how tired he got.  Midway through the trip we gave up on napping and turned his seat around.  And what do you know? Suddenly he was willing to nap in the car.

Okay, now on to the adventures.  We knew we'd have a LOT of driving, so we tried to plan fun activities for each day to make the drive part of the vacation.  Our first morning we drove to Portland and stopped just after lunch at the Portland Children's Museum. The kids had a blast.

That night we stayed in a hotel in Oregon, then drove the next day to Redding, California where we had another hotel.  We spent the afternoon swimming and enjoying the warm California sunshine.  After two nights in a hotel room, I (re)decided that hotels with little kids are pretty miserable.  

Thane (how do I put this gently?), was a nuisance!  Aubree and Bryce are old enough that they would have been able to calm down and go to sleep, but Thane (despite missing his nap...or maybe because of it...) would NOT stop talking or singing or crying and generally making it impossible for the other two to fall asleep.  That started a vicious cycle of one kid calming down only to have another start up, which provoked the others, and on and on.  It was during these moments that I contemplated not taking vacations again while we have kids under the age of three (Ha, ha! That would be a looooong time and you know I'm already planning the next trip...)

The next day we drove to visit one of my old roommates (Corri) from BYU and her family outside of Sacramento.  I haven't seen Corri for at least seven years, so we had a lot of fun reconnecting.  She's incredibly thorough and thoughtful about all her decisions, and I really appreciate her thoughts and insights.

Corri's baby boy was born just a few days after our visit

Our kids likewise had a great time playing together.  They spent their time playing in the sand box, riding bikes and scooters, pouring over Aiden's coin collection, enjoying ice cream sandwiches, and generally becoming best buddies.  They didn't want to leave when it was finally time to go.

After leaving Corri's, we made the short trip to my Aunt Becky's home.  When I was growing up, we visited Becky's home on a fairly regular basis, but I hadn't been back since I was in High School.  It was interesting to see the house and the neighborhood from adult eyes, rather than kid eyes (I remembered everything being much bigger).

Becky and her family greeted us with open arms, and Bryce and Thane were thrilled to find a stash of toys with which to play.  I was a bit surprised how much they enjoyed something so simple, after a few days of "bigger" activities.  They spent hours happily engaged with the train sets, noise makers, and piles of beaded necklaces.  

Aubree hunted around and found my cousin Jessica's old book collection.  She was especially interested in Jesse's Manga books and (once she figured out that she needed to read them "backwards") had a great evening reading when she wasn't talking or playing.  

We spent the afternoon and evening talking and reminiscing and eating great food and watching Becky and Jessica work on decorating Lauren's wedding cake.  The decorating process was fascinating to watch and the cake turned out gorgeous!