Catch the Moment: Week 17

A picture a day, for one year.

 So many things to love about this picture. I'm not a huge Mariner's fan, I mean - I'm from Seattle, have lived here most of my life and I will go to a game for the food and company. There, I said it. However, the grandparents are sports fans so every once in a while I oblige and send them a picture like this one. But seriously, when did my baby grow up? She's wearing K-Swiss sneaks, for gosh sakes.

 These are a few of my beautiful sister in laws. We celebrated a couple birthdays at the local trampoline park, which ended with two glamorous injuries (including yours truly) thanks for a moms vs. dads dodgeball. Yes, on trampolines. It's a long story, but basically an 11 year old sprained my ankle and it was so awesome because the next morning we flew out for our trip to Dallas! Yay! Because babywearing 2 kids and hauling a stroller with carseats and carry ons isn't hard enough to do; we needed to add a sprained ankle into the mix to make it interesting.

 Our trip to Dallas was flight #2 in the last year with both kids - and we have our third trip planned in December to fly across "The Pond" to see my parents over Christmas. Our first trip was to Long Beach in October, which was a mere 2 hour flight from Seattle. Seattle to Dallas is about a 4 hour flight, so we learned a few more lessons about how to fly efficiently and sanely with two littles. One huge travel tip came from That Mama Gretchen, who had recently flown to Texas with her littles too, and that was to put the ticketed non-lap child in their carseat for the flight. Penny was comfortable and calm for the flight. She's used to sitting in her car seat for sometimes hours at a time, so this wasn't that different. Miss Ruby, on the other hand.. well, she was a wiggly 15 month old who wasn't allowed to adventure like she wanted to. Again..more lessons were learned, but this was the exciting start for our super fun week in Dallas, which I will share more full details with you soon!

 Due to that (im)perfectly timed sprained ankle, I had to take it easy for the first part of our trip. But that wasn't going to stop me from taking the girls up to the infinity pool at the Omni hotel. How did I manage a 3 year old and a 1 year old in the water, by myself? Babywearing, of course. 

 Ok, I seriously lucked out on the hotel's restaurant. Texas Spice rocks my socks. The breakfast buffet was to die for. My glutinous, eager fingers made this photo come out embarassingly blurry, but what you'll find on that plate are eggs, breakfast potatoes, breakfast veggies, bacon, bread pudding, rice pudding and waay up there at the top were blueberries and raspberries. Why don't I just eat like this every day??

 More poor quality, but this was taken with a cell phone in a pretty much pitch black room so you'll forgive me. Both girls nap for 2 hours in the middle of the day and I was very thankful for their flexibility in our routine. I wasn't sure how it was going to go down with putting them to sleep in our hotel room each day, but it worked perfectly. Watching them sleep together on the bed made me dream more about them one day sharing their bedroom and perhaps even trying out sibling co-sleeping if that suits either of them. 

This picture won't do it justice but I hope you can get a good look. This is a pano of the view from the Giants of The Savannah view point at the Dallas Zoo. I actually ended up visiting the Dallas Zoo on two separate days because there was so much to see on the first day that we didn't get through everything. Thankfully I have an annual membership at the Woodland Park Zoo, which gave me reciprocal membership benefits of discount tickets. Zoos are kind of my thing (here's a list of zoos I've visited), so keep an eye out for what we thought of the Dallas Zoo. 

Catch the moment archives

These aren't on Instagram, but most others are!

Our family trip to Long Beach (7 months later) Part 1

While I'm away on my next adventure, I realized that it was probably high time that I shared about my last big one with our little family. I'm talking about our trip to Long Beach, CA from back in October. Uhm...yea. Bad blogger. Normally I'd be super pumped about writing down our travels the second that we got home, but there's something about 2 kids that makes the words pause at the end of my fingertips and sometimes they just never make it to the blog. Sorry! But nonetheless, here we are. Enjoy!

My husband's current position in his company takes him around the country a little more often than we were accustomed to a few years ago. Most places that he travels to are boring or he has a work project to support and will be working 16 hour days, so it doesn't normally make sense for the girls and I to tag along. But on the rare occasion, he snags a work trip that has a light work load and is actually in a destination where we could turn it into a little family vacation. And that's what happened with Long Beach, CA back in October.

I'm a pretty independent gal and I love to travel. To turn my blog into a family travel blog would be a dream come true. But for now, I am blessed to be able to piggyback on a few of my husband's business trips. The girls and I have a blast. They travel very well and I like to justify these little trips as our warm up for our trip to Germany in the winter, to visit my parents.

During these work trips we expect that my husband will be occupied during working hours (and sometimes longer), so I make sure to find ways to fill our time and make our travels worth it. While he was networking about natural gas solutions for the semi trucking industry, the girls and I cavorted around the Long Beach area for 4 days. Our hotel was in San Pedro, not too far from Long Beach. For one of our days we puttered around the water front there.

There is a little walking trail that takes you along the water front that parallels Harbor Blvd. It takes you past the USS Iowa, and we ended at the Gateway Plaza Fanfare Fountain. Every so often, classical music begins to play and the fountains are choreographed along. It was really pretty!

After his work commitment that evening, we took the drive out to Disneyland and walked along Downtown Disney. My husband comes from a Disneyland lovin' family - he's been dozens of times throughout his childhood and together we have gone twice. Our girls aren't at the age yet where we could justify the expense of the park tickets, let alone the sheer stimulation overload! So we went the free route and walking along the street of Downtown Disney was enough free fun for all of us. My father in law keeps asking me when we think that we'll take the girls into the actual park, and our best guess is that when Penny is 8 years old and Ruby is 6 they will have a total blast. Hopefully we will have someday-Baby #3 (and maybe even someday-Baby #4) along with us, but at the moment we can only plan for at what age these two girls will have fun. :) We had dinner at Tortilla Joe's, where Penny got her first balloon animal and I learned a few secrets on how to make the perfect guacamole.

The locals had a good laugh at us too. It was October and the temperatures were in the high 60's, low 70's. That is called tank top, flip flop and shorts weather in Washington. My kids are out in the backyard in the swimming suits and playing in our sprinkler while I lounge on a blanket in that weather. Californians don't seem to think that's appropriate in October, so we got laughed at when we hauled our family down to the hotel's pool. It had already been shut down for the winter! But luckily the hot tub was turn down to low and we went in that instead. Whatevs, works for us!

Oh, and that ring sling that I'm sure you've noticed? The one that lets me wear Ruby and still play in the water? None other than the fabulous Beach Front Baby ring sling, of course!  Click on over to that link to read more about it! No babywearing parent should be caught without one this summer.

My absolute favorite part of this trip was our visit to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. As it turns out, I have started to make a habit of visiting the local zoo or aquarium whenever we travel somewhere. It's a fun outing for everyone because they tend to be very toddler friendly. There's countless lessons to learn about the animals, our environment and thinking about the big picture. Not to mention, it's a great way to expend some of that toddler energy that builds up when cooped up in a hotel room! Penny was able to run around and I didn't have to constantly reign her in. But that, my friends, is a story for another blog post! Head over to read about our adventures at The Aquarium of the Pacific.