Vacation

 

We had a blast on our vacation. I realized that I needed one pretty badly. I think the last time I had 10 consecutive days off was 3 years ago when Peter was born. Yikes. We've done little trips here and there but with the boys being so little, I just haven't taken a lot of time off of work and gone on a proper vacation. Yikes again.

We kept it simple and stayed in Rancho Mirage at some villas that a friend of ours owns through a timeshare thing. We don't quite get how it works, all we know is that we love our friend very much and we LOVE to stay at this place. Sure, it is 100plus temperatures but it is just so fun to eat a leisurely breakfast, head to the pool, eat a leisurely lunch, head to the pool, and eat a leisurely dinner. As you can see...there is a lot of eating and swimming involved.

Matthew liked the floating cars I brought for them....and he liked Leigh as his "driver"

Peter loved playing with all the water toys

Usually I have "withdrawls" from my Blackberry when I start a vacation. I don't feel right that it is not by my side and I have an urge to check my work e-mail on my laptop (I disable the work email from coming through onto my blackberry). This time, I didn't care where my phone was and I had less than 0 urge to look at my work e-mail. It was awesome. And a reminder of how much I needed a break from work.

We spent the first couple of days with some good friends, worshiped at a local church in Palm Desert, and just relaxed. The boys watched A LOT of Thomas the Tank Engine, Veggie Tales, Cars, and Toy Story. I figure we are relaxing by doing the stuff we like to do...so why not let them do what they love to do? Besides...it allowed me to read a fantastic book called, "The Help." It was a great novel and one of those classic stories where when you are finished you are sad to leave the characters behind.

About 2 days in, my parents and Tante Heidi and Uncle Leigh arrived. They spent 3 nights with us. It was really fun to get in some more visiting time with Tante Heidi and Uncle Leigh.

One crazy thing that happened was the facility we were staying in lost power for 12 hours. I guess the local SCE had to do some repair work and as a result our place was going to be without power for 12 hours starting at 10pm on a Monday till 10am the next day. I We were a little concerned about how it would go. The air conditioners would shut off obviously....thankfully the resort was extremely accommodating. They brought us bags of ice, flashlights, glow sticks and offered us 50% off at breakfast at their hotel the next day. We had the choice of staying in the hotel, but the thought of packing up the port a crib and everything else sounded like a big pain. So we decided to gamble. Everything went great except for once in the night when Peter woke up and freaked out it was pitch black. It literally was pitch black. I was scared too! Mike went and helped him out and he ended up being fine. And the room never got unbearably hot.

At breakfast the next morning

We spent a morning, or should I say HOT morning at the Living Desert Museum. I had promised Peter we would see camels and was super bummed to see the camels don't make an appearance until October. Needless to say, this has created a caution within me to not overly promote any attraction we go to going forward. He was pretty bummed about the camels, but he got over it. We saw giraffes, zebras, and a lot of other stuff. I have a hard time remembering because I was sweating buckets while the boys tromped all over as though it was 70 degrees.

giraffes!

our tour guide

there was a great model railroad that Matthew loved

My sister, her boyfriend, Mike, and I went to the outlets one day. It was fun to spend time with Heidi and Leigh. I gave Leigh an education on Icees and Pretzel Dogs. He did not seem to be impressed with the Icees but did like the Pretzel Dogs.

plotting their next move....

attack Gramps!

reading The Gruffalo with Tante Heidi (very fun book by the way)

Another night, Heidi and Leigh treated us all to dinner. That was super generous of them. And I can safely say that I had the strongest margarita ever that night. It was ridiculous. Guess I am used to the watered down Cadillacs at El Torito.

 

My family left on Thursday afternoon and we stayed until Saturday morning. It was really sad saying goodbye because my sister and Leigh were returning to Australia. To squash our sadness over their departure, we ate at one of our favorite restaurants, Roy's, for dinner.

I was a little nervous about how the boys would do--this was by far the fanciest place we had ever taken them to eat. It ended up being a very memorable night. Turns out the staff at Roy's is really kid friendly. As soon as we arrived they gave our boys toys to play with at the table (and they weren't cheap dentist toys, they were cool toys), an appetizer plate with quesadillas, apples, celery, and carrots, and at the end of the meal they brought them each a scoop of ice cream with a brownie. It was so sweet to see them so excited and even more awesome for us to eat food we love. After dinner we headed back and we all watched Toy Story 2 together. Good times.

By Friday the boys little feet were so worn out from being in the kiddie pool that their toes were bleeding...so our pool time was cut short and I was bummed. I will leave out the part where I tried to convince Mike to let them stay in the kiddie pool because we were having so much fun. We spent the rest of the day in our room, soaking up our last moments of freedom.

Saturday morning we packed up. It was kind of funny because we had planned to leave at 10am, thinking that check out was noon. At some point the housekeeping staff knocked on our door and informed us that check out was at 10. Yikes! We had to move fast to pack up a week's worth of stuff but we made it in the end.

On our way out of town we stopped at the local Children's Discovery Museum. It was pretty cute. They had a grocery store for the kids to play in and other scenarios--like a pet hospital. And they had a place where you could paint a car. Kind of random, but we had a good time.

at the grocery store. Peter filled his cart with fruit and vegetables. I found this entertaining as he never eats his veggies!

We were glad to be home..kind of. Peter kept saying he wanted to go back to our "little house" (that's what we were calling it) and that he wanted to be on vacation again. It took about 2 weeks for them to not want to watch TV 24/7. Who am I kidding? They still kind of want to watch it all the time. :)

I am so thankful that we were able to take a trip and I am definitely looking forward to our next vacation already!