Catching up Again

I don't know how people have time to keep up on blogs. I had a grand idea to update this on Sunday afternoons, but somehow those have gotten busy, too. Jenny uses the post-church naptime hour to write to her brother on his mission in Sweden, and after that the kids wake up and it's play time. Anyway, excuses aside, here are some photos to catch you up on part of our summer.

The biggest event of the summer for us was an extended Draper family trip to Southern California. My youngest brother, Neil, came home from his mission (Cincinnati, Spanish-speaking) on the 1st of July. He had left for his mission about a month before my other brother, Ben, returned from his own mission in August 2007.



So, to celebrate my family being all together for the first time in about four years, my parents (mostly) paid for all of us to go to Southern California for a few days, for our first Draper family vacation in a really, really long time. We spent a day and a half in San Diego, and a day and half in Los Angeles. The main reason for the trip to California was that the Cubs were on a West Coast road trip, so my brothers and Dad went to see them one night in San Diego against the Padres, and then took the whole family to see them the next night at Dodger Stadium.




Here are my brothers and I enacting the inside joke of the week, which, namely, is that all Asian and South American people flash the peace sign in all of the many, many pictures they take. OK, that's a rude over-generalization, but you've got to admit that's funny.

Turns out we should have flipped the attendees of each game around. The Padres' PETCO Stadium was beautiful, new, and very relaxing. It was a perfect family environment, complete with a giant sandbox for kids in right field. Dodger Stadium was the complete opposite.




This was the best part of Dodger Stadium, which is that my girls loved their Dodger Dogs. No one else could finish them, though. They were not good. The stadium was huge, impersonal, loud, smelly, and the Dodger fans could not stop doing The Wave. I hate The Wave. Plus, traffic and parking were atrocious. We spent a solid hour absolutely parked on the freeway waiting to get to the game, during which time Madeleine barfed in her coloring book. Of course, we hadn't brought a change of clothes, so she smelt like throw-up all night long. Thank goodness it was in a rental car, and not our own.

The better part of our trip were our family outings to the San Diego Zoo, the beach, and Knott's Berry Farm.



This was the best picture we could get of the pandas. There were two of them, and while one was sleeping in an unphotographable location, the other one was posing perfectly and chewing bamboo . . . right until we got up close enough to photo it. Then it decided to wander off and turn its back on everyone. Oh well. At least we got to see a real live panda, even if it was its backside.





The zoo was a lot of fun for the girls, and it was pretty low key, and not too busy. The next day we went to the beach, and had a blast. And, I was dumb enough to wander around without a shirt on, and paid the price with a mean sunburn when we got home. The girls enjoyed the ocean IF I held them while we went in. Madeleine developed an unnatural terror of seaweed, and had to be kept away from it at all times. The highlight, though was building a "splash pool" for Tori. She has been obsessed all summer with swimming and pools. Anything more than an inch of water qualifies as a "splash pool." So, everyone pitched in on the beach to dig her a pool in the wet sand, which then filled in with seawater.



Well, with all that lovely, muddy, wet sand around, we couldn't resist a mud fight. It resulted in maybe one of my favorite pictures ever of Jenny.



Our final day we went to Knott's Berry Farm. It definitely exceeded our expectations. There was a large kids section, which wasn't terribly crowded. The girls had a blast on all of the rides.



I enjoyed myself, too, and not just on the kiddie rides pictured here. They had some really great thrill rides. I always thought Knott's was just an extra cheap alternative to DisneyLand, and although the prices were cheap ($30 for adults), the rides were top notch. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone on a budget who has been to Disney already. We've done Disney three times in our marriage already, including Disney World last October, so we were ready for something else. Knott's Berry Farm definitely delivered the goods.



We had a great time and Madeleine is already asking where we're going next!