Life in Cali

Maddi at Age 1

Mia at Age 1

Ella exploring the sand. She's still not quite sure how she feels about the sand or the water but has a blast anyway just hanging out on the blanket with Mommy and climbing on the chairs, and trying to get into any snacks in sight. It's whole different world from her sisters. Mia would bolt toward the water any chance she got and we finally had to put water wings on her because she didn't want anyone to hold her in the water, and Maddi developed an instant love with the sand and would put her head FACE down into the sand and just roll around. The pictures above to prove my point! It's so fun to see their unique personalities. :)

A little beach off the Pacific Coast Highway that we stopped off at one evening. We've really enjoyed being able to go to the beach for just and hour or two and it doesn't have to be an all day event (although I personally still enjoy the all day event when we have the time).

Mia having a blast in the sand....Sadly this day ended in tragedy when Mia learned the hard way the reality of the ocean. Her shovel she had been digging with was swept away when the tide came in a little too far and while Lance made an attempt to grab it...there was nothing we could do and the shovel was gone. Mia was in shock that the ocean could do such a terrible thing and that there was nothing Mommy or Daddy could do to fix it. We tried to explain how that happens sometimes at the beach and that we have plenty of other shovels at home but to no avail. She was completely heartbroken about this shovel and kept saying how she did not like the ocean and never wanted to go back. I think she cried the whole way home for her shovel. Lance kept looking at me like where did our easy going child go? And who is this emotional girl sitting in the back seat? Coming from a family of 4 girls myself I told him...."This is just the beginning!" Poor Mia. Thankfully she's recovered from her first beach trauma and is finding things to like about the ocean again.

My attempt at a self-timer family picture. I didn't quite make it back into the picture and apparently it wouldn't have made a difference as I obviously didn't have the best camera angle! Haha. What's funny is that I think I got the best smiles out the girls on this one. You can see that we just gave up after this attempt and just traded off taking the pictures.

We are renting a great little two-story townhouse here in California and while it's small we do have a fenced in private backyard. I wanted to get a picture in our backyard because I love all the tropcial vegetation they have here. We were worried that it would be really hard to give up our nice big backyard in Spokane and while we do miss it, I've realized that all I really need is to have some area (that's contained) where the kids can go outside when I can't go with them.

And what we are loving about our little neighborhood is the pool (free entertainment that you can walk to is nice) and the little park (which gives us a change of pace when we're tired of our own backyard).

After arriving in California we got to enjoy another week and a half with Lance at home before he had to start working. Of course most of that time was filled with all the fun moving stuff like getting drivers licenses, registering cars, moving boxes around etc etc but we still had time to go to hit the beach a few times and do some exploring.