A Week in Paradise

This post should have been posted 6 months ago. But, I couldn't get any of the pictures to upload to my blog for some reason and it's been driving me nuts. So nuts that I basically stopped blogging here. But I got it to work now so we are back in business!!

Last August when Josh mentioned that he had a conference that he needed to attend in Southern California at the end of February, it took me less than 2 seconds to announce that the whole family would be coming along! The thing about Josh's job is that he can't really take time off during the school year for vacation...but this was FOR his job AND it was during the awful month of February (cold!), so we were thrilled to come along!

We started the trip by heading to Las Vegas on Friday night and then on to San Diego Saturday. We remembered that San Diego was paradise, I just don't think we remembered QUITE how paradise like it is. Plus, it was really, really fun to see friends there. We love that place!

We were only in San Diego for 2 and a half days (and Josh was only there for 1 day before he had to head to his conference), but we packed them SO full of fun it was amazing! On Monday, the day that we did the most fun things, Dal announced that it was the best day of his life! (That changed later in the week...)

Here are some of the fun things we did in San Diego. (Most of these pictures are off my phone so the quality is a little lacking.)

We went out to dinner with some of our very best San Diego friends! Here I am with my really good friends Karen and Tala:

Tala always loved Dallen! He doesn't remember her but he still let her snuggle him!

We went to our very favorite spot in San Diego, La Jolla Cove and explored the tide pools and played on the beach. We could have stayed here forever. Love that place!

We found this really great crab shell. It was as big as my hand:

We went to the Mormon Battalion visitor's center-another of our very favorite places:

We met more friends at a park after school and then went and got ice cream. This is Jack with some of his old best friends Nithilan and Andrew:

And here's Adam enjoying his ice cream:

And we met my cousins and went to Balboa park. Love that place and love my cousins! Here's the boys in front of a fountain:

And we (and by we I mean they) went swimming at the hotel pool:

Here's what I did while they swam:

I should mention that almost all of this was done without Josh because he was off at his conference. We also met another group of friends at a park and ate out a bunch, went to church in our old ward, checked out some of our old favorite parks. In short, in the 72 hours or so we really packed it in in San Diego.

Then we drove up to meet daddy in Ventura, where his conference was. He took a day off so we could go to Disneyland! This is when Dal's best day ever had some competition!

Here they are on the tram-so excited! 

Here are the boys ready for the Toy Story ride: (I guess that was actually on Friday in California Adventure)

Each of the boys got to build their own light saber. This one is fierce:

Adam was very serious about his driving on Autopia: (sorry, these are just cell phone pics-so some got a little blurry)

The merry go round is a huge hit with all of them!

 We also spent a day on the beach in Ventura. Nathan found these rocks and made a rainbow. So cool!

Adam was so tired at this point that he was pretty grumpy. The other boys would have played for hours!

Then, we spent one more day at Disney, this time in California Adventure.

Cars Land had long waits-like reeeeaaaally long-so to entertain ourselves we had a grumpy face contest:

But we did love Cars Land:

And the Merry Go Round:

It was such a fun vacation and such a perfect time to go to California! Just writing about it makes me want to do it again!