What a great Mother's Day! We celebrates with Amy's family yesterday and my parents were out of town for the weekend, so we had no commitments for the day... So we decided last night to go to Santa Cruz for the day.
We figured we would just have a leisurely day with no particular plans. We packed some crackers and cheese for snacks and planned on finding a restaurant on the beach to eat at. We ended up leaving around 10:30 am and hit traffic once we hit highway 17. Apparently, a trailer flipped over on its side. It was a good thing we didn't have plans! The drive ended up taking 4 hours to get there. We ended up stopping at a Carl's Jr. in San Jose for lunch, since we knew the kids wouldn't last all the way there.
This ended up being a minor milestone... This was the first time we had taken Caleb inside of a restaurant since he was diagnosed 9 months ago. I think both Amy and I were a nervous wreck the whole time. We had a keen eye on everyone in the restaurant looking for anyone with so little as a sniffle or a sneeze.
When we got to Santa Cruz, we drove along the water looking for Natural Bridges. The kids were super excited to see the ocean, and the boats and kayaks on the water. We even saw a whale spouting!
Once we got to Natural Bridges, we all "hiked" down to the water, and laid claim to our little piece of the beach. I don't know how crowded this beach usually is, but today seemed especially crowded. It didn't seem to matter to anyone as we had a great time!
Eli was hesitant to touch the sand for the first 2 hours. We laid out a towel on the sand, and he stood on it the whole time. At times he would venture to the edge of it, but never off of it. He would even reach a toe out and let it hover over the sand, without actually putting it down. That is, until he did... Then there was no turning back. At one point, he even realized he didn't mind eating the sand. A family near us started laughing as they saw him shoving sand in his mouth. They were kind enough to tell us about it, since he had turned his back to us so we couldn't see what he was doing.
Baker and Caleb loved chasing the waves with me. Baker would run down to the edge of the water, and then scream in jubilee as she ran back up the beach with the waves crashing behind her.
There was also a pond area where a river drained into the ocean. The kids loved playing in it, since the water was no more than a foot deep, and was much warmer than the actual ocean. Eli even walked around in the water splashing.
The highlight of the day was when we met the family camped next to ours. Alvin, Jenny, Rachel, Abigail, Naomi, and Isaiah. We met because Isaiah is 3, just like Caleb, and wanted to come over and play with him. As we were meeting and introducing everyone, we quickly realized we had many Biblical names among our children. So the obvious question arose, are we Christians... And then we realized we had even more in common! While they weren't familiar with Lodi, they did know of Lodi, NJ, having lived in NJ several years ago. They homeschool their kids. Jenny had all of her kids by C-section. All of her kids were incrementally bigger at birth, with her youngest, Isaiah, weighing in at 10lb 3oz. Eli was 10lb 4 oz! We talked with them and the kids played for probably 2 hours. What a great family! (I later searched online for them and found out that Alvin is an outreach pastor at a church in San Jose).
We finally left the beach around 6pm. On the way out of Santa Cruz, we found an ice cream place for the kids. What a perfect topper to a great day! I was going to order a "Mexican hot chocolate" but the girl that worked there suggested I sample it first, since it's a little spicy. Boy am I glad I listened to her. It was the spiciest ice cream I'd ever tasted. I had to sample a different flavor just to try and get the flavor out of my mouth!
The kids, on the other hand, loved their vanilla ice cream!
Once we got on the road, we hit traffic again leaving Santa Cruz. I took us another 3 hours to drive home. the kids quickly passed out once we got on the road. The only excitement on the way home was as we crossed the altamont. For some reason, Eli squirmed himself awake and started crying (probably because he realized he was sleeping, but not in his own bed). His crying woke Caleb up, and not pleasantly. Caleb then started screaming at Eli to be quiet (literally screaming as loud as he could) which then caused Eli to scream. It was a downward spiral from there. It was probably half an hour of nerve-grating screams, each trying to outdo the other, until they both tired themselves out. The rest of the drive home was in peace, and we all slept well that night!
Happy Mother's Day!!
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