Community Helper Week and the end of the Red Warriors

At C & A's school this week, they were studying "community helpers".  Tuesday the Fire Department visited with their large truck, Wednesday the post office arrived with three postal workers, Thursday was the Police and Friday the Mayor of our small city came in (his daughter is in their class)!.   It was a pretty cool and special week!

 

 

A and C also started gymnastics again, much to their begging.  It's been around four months since their last class, and their cooperation level was so, SO much better this week.  It was a wonderful relief to see!

This weekend also marked the end of the Red Warriors basketball team.  It was a tough season, as the teams were bizarrely mismatched in terms of talent and age.  Josh really had his work cut out for him this season!

 

Jake and Braxton call themselves the Splash Brothers!

Random Fun

Phew...the nine days of holiday are now complete, and normalcy will return tomorrow.  We've had quite a fun week though really.  Some random highlights:

I picked a new hike location to try today, and opted for Windy Hill Open Space in Portola Valley.  I've been to this open space but only from up on the Skyline side of it (flying kites with Mom and Dad when I was young I believe).  It was a perfect hiking loop for us around a little lake, with no complaints from the kids on this gorgeous day!  We'll be returning to try some different trails for sure this Spring.  

 We made a crazy lemon/orange juice concoction after we picked nearly 50 pieces of fruit from our trees in the backyard.

We built forts...can't really ever beat forts when it's too early to get outside during vacation!

When the bowling alley plans didn't work out, we found the silly rides in front of the supermarket, and Whack a' Mole at Pizza Hut plenty entertaining.  We followed those up with discovering a new park, and then ended the day with some serious chalk drawings at home.  

 

What a week!   Now to play for Spring Break which is just a short two months away!

Mama and Jake Day

Yesterday was Jake's last day of his holiday break, and he and I had a great day together.  After dropping off the girls at school, we headed down to San Jose to start the day with a Disney on Ice show at SAP center.   Our local Mother's Club had worked out an awesome deal for $10 seats for this Friday matinee show, and we've never been, so I figured we'd give it a try.   It was a great show, with the start and end filled with many, many traditional Disney characters singing and dancing.  A large portion of the show was reenacting the Frozen movie on ice, which was really well done.  Jake isn't a huge fan of that movie (so he says), but he was really excited each time a new set, actor or trick was brought out onto the ice.  After the two hour show, we hiked across town to the Children's Discovery Museum for some more fun.  We're realizing that Jake is getting a bit old for it, but he still found the water, bubble and healthy living exhibit quite fun.   I'm so happy that I got an entire day just to play and hold Jake's hand, as he is growing up so fast!!!

 

 The San Jose Earthquakes were set up at the museum, so Jake was excited to meet their mascot and play a little soccer too.

Monterey Mini Getaway

With Jake having the whole President's Day week off from school, I decided to book a mini vaca down to Monterey.  The kids have been begging to stay in a hotel ever since our short stay in SF over the holidays, and we just love Monterey, so I figured, why not?  I booked us a place in downtown Monterey so that we could walk around without a problem.  The day ended up being so incredibly gorgeous on our drive down though, we drove straight to the beach in Pacific Grove.   This beach, Asilomar, is officially one our top 5 beaches ever.  The sand is this ridiculously soft, white sand, that is absolutely perfect for building sand castles and sand cakes in.  All along the beach are tide pools, and climbing rocks, that the kids couldn't get enough of either.  We absolutely could have stayed there for many, many more hours.   We did want to experience a bit of downtown though, so we headed back and walked down to the Fisherman's Wharf area to have some dinner.  Unfortunately our good friend's kids were all sick, so our little play date idea didn't quite work out, but we hit the pool for an after dinner swim instead and the kids were just as happy.   On Tuesday Josh drove into work, and the kids and I stayed to play for the day.  We hit the parks, lunched with our friends, and had a great time at this kids museum.