Vacation!

It's been a crazy week for us! We went up to visit my parents in San Jose last Tuesday, came home Thursday night, Kyle worked Friday, we left for San Diego on Saturday, and we got back home tonight. It has been so much fun, though! Andrew and Amberlynn, my cousin and his wife, were out visiting my parents, along with their 8 month old son Chase, so we were able to spend time with them. It had been a few years since we saw Andrew, and we'd never met Amberlynn or Chase, so it was really nice to hang out with them. I also got to spend a little time with my friend Lauren, who I wrote about in the last blog. I'll be going back up to San Jose some time this week to spend more time with her and to go to Terry's memorial. It has been really amazing what has come from this, however (even though we would all rather still have Terry) - there's going to be a scholarship fund set up so that Lauren's brother can finish college, the media room at the school he taught at is supposed to be named after him, and the state assembly reconvened early last week in his memory. Anyway, back to the original point of the blog. On Thursday we (Kyle, my parents, Andrew, Amberlynn, Chase and I) drove over to Monterey and went to the Aquarium and then a beach. I've been there so many times, but it still amazes me. Plus, this time I was with a cute little baby, and he was lovin it! So it made it even more fun.
San Diego was also TONS of fun. We (this time it's me, Kyle, Lee, Leslie (dad and mom), Ryan, Sarah, Taylor and Ayla (brother, sister, and nieces)) went down and stayed with Leslie's dad and step mom, and also met up with her sister and brother in law. We all went to SeaWorld together yesterday, and spent ALL day there. I wore a pedometer, and we walked well over 8 miles. Good workout! Both the girls behaved so well. Taylor was a little trooper, and didn't get upset at all, even when she was up way past her bed time. She got new Shamu pajamas to wear at night, along with little Shamu slippers, so she was nice and cozy, even if she was still up too late. We saw every show we possibly could (Cirque de la Mer is AMAZING), and just over all had a great time.

All this to say..... I have 3 gigs worth of pictures from these two trips, and I can't get them on my computer to share with you yet! I've always been a picture fiend, and it's just getting worse now that I'm teaching myself more and more about photography, so our poor little laptop is full. Literally, it was completely full and yelling at me because it had no more storage space. I was able to clean it up a bit, but I still don't have room to upload all these pictures, so I can't share them with you until we get some sort of external storage device to move older pictures to. Hopefully I'll get that taken care of soon, because I really have some awesome pictures to share.

Hope you all had a safe and happy 4th!