Whale Watching

On our last day of summer before school started we wanted to do something really great to celebrate the change from summer to beginning of a new school year so we went whale watching!  Unfortunately, our camera battery died so I only got these few shots with my phone but we had a great time.  We went out of Santa Cruz on a three hour tour, a three hour tour.  We didn't end up shipwrecked, but we saw dolphins, sea otters, sea lions and a beautiful humpback whale.  We saw the same humpback several times as it would surface for a few minutes and then dive.  When it would dive we would get a wonderful view of the tail coming out of the water and then going straight down.  It was a gorgeous day on the ocean and a great way to celebrate the last day of summer break. 

Beach Fun

Right after school got out we headed down to the beach for a long weekend where Nick was playing in a soccer tournament.  We were blessed with near perfect with weather to play in the sand and surf.

  

Noah demonstrating his skills with the Asian squat while digging for sand crabs.

 Aliyah enjoying playing in the sand.  Every once in awhile I am able to capture her "true" smile rather than her "mom is taking a picture so I'll say cheese smile."  I must say though that getting the sand out of her hair was a major undertaking!

 Pete and Nick playing baseball in the sand between soccer matches.

Nick playing in one of his three sand soccer games of the weekend.

Cooling off in the waves after the last game.  It was a perfect weekend to kick off our summer fun :)

Memorial Weekend

Hey, I'm only three weeks on posting pictures :)  Memorial Weekend we had no games, no birthday parties, no plans... and it was great!  We did what we love which is just get up and go wherever sounds like fun for the day.  For that particular weekend that included cherry picking...

Hiking among beautiful Redwood trees..

And checking out the WWII airplanes that were visiting our local airport.

I LOVE this last picture of Noah.  He'd had enough of the camera filled weekend and was ready to do something else (can you guess what?)

We are trying to keep summer relatively low key and unscheduled so we can enjoy more days like these.

Busy Spring

If you are wondering why I've been such a bad blogger this Spring, here are some pictures to demonstrate what almost every weekend looked like.  There were soccer games...

Baseball games....

Looking for bugs on the sidelines...

Trying to find shade on hot days ....

And then every Sunday night for about an hour and a half, I am doing Aliyah's hair.

The last few months have been really busy, a little too busy for my liking in fact.  Both boys were playing baseball and Nick started playing competitive soccer.  In addition to sports Nick also had first communion classes once a week and then had his first communion at the end of April along with both his birthday and mine. Those pictures are on the old camera but hopefully I'll get around to downloading those soon. 

The sports are all wrapped up for Spring and we are looking forward to lots of unscheduled weekends of summer fun!

Mothers Day

For Mother's Day in addition to wonderful handmade gifts from each of the children, Pete got me a new camera.  I wish I was a better photographer and I wish I was interested in getting a great camera and learning how to use it but as much as I want to be that person, I'm just not.  My dearest husband realizes this and bought me a camera that will hopefully take pretty good pictures without me having to do much except point and shoot.  I could look up what kind of camera it is or I could say that it's pink, it's got a long lense, it's heavier than your normal compact camera and I like it a lot.  Here's the first shot we took (and yes, I'm in my snuggy that Pete bought me for Christmas.)

Snow Day

Aliyah's birthday is March 5 which is a perfect time to go to the snow!  Now if her mom could just get around to posting birthday pictures in her actually birthday month...

Tide Pools

Recently we went to one of our favorite day trip places, the tide pools!  We had a nice sea food lunch and then had fun exploring all the critters of the ocean.