California in a Nutshell

We started our whirlwind US summer vacation tour in California, where we spent the first few days kicking the jet lag. We've got it down to a pretty good system by now. Don't get me wrong, it's far from perfect. It's three kids and sheer, complete exhaustion, but we've got a pretty good system down and the girls recovered remarkably well! We were so tired after the long, long flight we could have fallen asleep given a second of downtime.

Hannah fell in love with her blondie cousins. She often feels quite alone over here with her golden hair. She loved having little cohorts to be blonde with. We hadn't even left the airport in San Francisco before she loudly pointed out a family to me, saying "It's a blondie Mama, and blondie kids!! And they are speaking English!" I think she enjoyed a little time back being in the good old USA, and fitting right in again. I guess we should take a Scandinavian tour next.

We spent about a week and a half in California, and as always it passed way, way too quickly. I'll do a whirlwind recap here. Mostly the week was spent hanging out with my parents, my two sisters, my brother-in-law, and my sweet niece and nephew.

We had sleepovers with cousins in the new bunkbeds at Nana and Grandpa's house. The bunk room was quite popular with all the cousins.

We went to the city pool and splashed like mad.

We snuggled our Nana.

We went to McDonalds. And played in the play place. And collected beanie baby stuffed animals from happy meals. And we wore happy meal boxes on our head. Well, at least Hannah did.

We spent some quality time with our cute little cousins.

We attempted family pictures, and were foiled by the lighting.

Not pictured: we ran through the sprinklers naked (the 5 and under crowd that is), we played outside (for hours on end), we ate killer bbq, we reads tons of books, we played at our aunt's house, we camped (which is going to be it's own post), and overall just had a fantastic, relaxing vacation. Till next year California!