Sequoia National Park

Ty and Michelle invited us to join them on a day trip to Sequoia. We had a great time. Once in the park we stopped for a picnic lunch.

The kids played awhile, there were a lot of cool trees and big rocks to climb on

As we drove up the mountain we started seeing little piles of snow on the ground, that turned into seeing only small patches of grass.

We drove by the very small winter parking for General Sherman,and it was packed, so we kept driving and found the another road covered in snow, but not blocked off :)

You can see the road had been plowed, but then they had more snow.

We had fun with the big snow walls

At the end of the plowed road was a huge hill (I'm at the bottom)

We found a post sticking out of the ground and a nice spot for a group shot



This picture sort of shows you how much snow there was, those are the roof's of buildings

Time to head back, our toes are froze

School Carnival

We had a great time Friday night at Teresa's school carnival. Here are a few pictures of the kids

Teresa's class had the face painting booth, she worked in it for a bit.

Here she is doing Nathan's face

Playing some of the games

Teresa with her blue hair, and Nathan with his read hair

Teresa, Nathan and Hannah climbing the rock wall

Spikey Hair

Nathan wanted to do his own hair the other day. So I let him...

He got frustrated when it wouldn't stay so mom stepped in with gel, hairspray and a blow dryer. It last a couple hours :)

A little fun

(Look, I was able to upload pictures)

Aren't these guys silly!?
Ayda came and spent a few hours with us this morning. It was lots of fun! We hope to have her back really soon (that means her mom will be having the baby) When I told Ayda her mom and dad were coming, Nathan told me to tell them the wrong words, that Ayda wasn't here.



We made butterflies with those toilet paper rolls

Picnic at the Park

We had our first official BBQ at the park with Ty, Michelle, Ian, Luke, Serina, Sean and Ryan. It started out nice and sunny and then the wind blew and it got a little cool. But not cool enough to stop us. Eventually the sun came out again and it wasn't as cold. We had a delicious meal and then we flew the kites Michelle brought.

Nathan is going to swing

Teresa is playing ball with Luke, and Nathan and Ian are on a spinner thing


Peek-a-boo Luke!


Serina and Ryan swinging


The cousins (Ian, Teresa, Luke and Nathan)


They were flying kites and having a pretty good time, but then one got stuck in the tree. So Ty climbed that little tree to free the kite.

Thursday

I have a lot of pictures from this day too. But I'm just going to post a few.

First we took the kids to Dennis the Menace Park - Nathan was SO excited, I don't think he stopped running the whole time.

Playing on an old engine, and posing on a crazy bridge


Jonathan and Nathan heading to run across the bridge, and Teresa and Nathan running across the bridge

One of the many crazy slides


After the park we went to fisherman's wharf, walked around and had lunch. Then we had to check in for our whale watching trip(3 hour trip). We all had a great time for the first 45 minutes or so. It was like a rollercoaster. The swells were 10-20 feet high, it was crazy. The captain would stop the engines so we could feel the huge swells. Which was fine for the first 1/2 of the trip.

(I love these two pictures)

We found thousands of dolphins - 3 different kinds. In order to see them they stopped the engines, so the boat was going up and down A LOT. Which made for some very sea sick people. None of us were feeling our best at that point.

Nathan was either sleeping or just out of it the rest of the trip. Jonathan held him most of the time. He thought he was going to get sick so he came and stood by me, but he did okay. Teresa wasn't so lucky, she joined those depositing into the ocean. But she was good after that, and the trip was almost over. I couldn't sit down, I had to watch the ocean the whole time, or my head and tummy would feel bad.

We did get to see 3 whales, but they were really hard to photograph. They didn't come out of the water very much.

Oh we saw lots of sea lions pulling out of the docks.

It was fun, for the most part. We won't be going again, we've been twice and we're good ;)

**Don't forget to check out Mon, Tues and Wed**

Wednesday

Now that the week is over and Teresa is back in school (which we're not happy about that), I figured I should post at least a few pictures of our trip to Monterey. We had a nice time. The drive there was pretty(I posted 2 pictures on my photo blog).

Our first stop was the Monterey Bay Aquarium

This is a huge tank with lots of different creatures

Here you can touch different things -star fish, sea cucumbers, hermit crabs, etc.. They both loved this, although at one point Nathan was more interested in the metal filters that stuck out of the water.

This is the deep sea tank. That big blur is a huge tuna that kept zipping by getting faster and faster

(I have tons of pictures of all the cool creatures. I'll be putting them in a photo book when I have more time. I'll try and post a link to it when I'm done)

After the aquarium we went to dinner - the thing that instigated our trip to Monterey - Bubba Gumps. We were able to get a table quickly and enjoyed our food - Buckets of boat trash and Mahi Mahi - all very yummy!

After dinner we went into the candy store there on Cannery Row- lots of fun stuff there. Then off to the hotel. The kids didn't know it, but we had a full day ahead of is the next day.

**Check out what we did Monday and Tuesday **