Spring Break 2016

The kids and I got brave and took a a couple of adventures to Chick-Fil-A with our friends and also to the San Francisco zoo!

Springtime Excusrions

Nick got away to Vegas with his classmates for a weekend.  He traveled there by private plane that was flown by one of his buddies who is also a veteran.  We had loads of fun seeing them off and welcoming them back!  Also, Nick made a quick trip to Tahoe with Emmy and Hannah for their first day of skiing!

Tahoe

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

Nick arranged to go snowboarding with his classmates; "networking," if you will.  To say I had a positive attitude about it would be a flat out lie.  Just before he was due to leave, my cell phone died in a tugging match between my darling offspring.  Already stressed, I told Nick he could not leave me at home with the four kids without a phone for the weekend.  So he went out and got me a fancy new phone.  And then he left.  The next morning, in an attempt to change my bad attitude around, I decided to live large and take the kids (and Molly) to have a breakfast picnic on the beach in Half Moon Bay. We picked up breakfast at Jack N The Box and took it to a sweet little spot.  After breakfast, we decided to go chase some waves, as you do at the beach.  It was all fine and well until I looked down to pull out my fancy new phone to snap a cute picture of our fun, and a rogue wave came and knocked us all over.  As I frantically grabbed my precious babies to pull them out of the water, I lost grip of my new phone and it got carried away out to sea.  People came running down the beach to make sure my terrified babies and I were ok, and thankfully, aside from their new fear of the ocean, my lost new phone and my totaled Nikon D90, we were.  We trudged our way back to the car (and Molly), and, wholly unprepared for such a time as this, we stripped down to our underwear and cranked up the heater and drove home.  Our conversation the entire way home consisted of thanking God for our safety and reminding ourselves, over and over, that stuff can be replaced. (I was hopeful that the more times I repeated it, the more I would believe it myself.) When we pulled into the parking lot, we followed through with our exit plan to get to the apartment one by one to dry off and put new clothes on.  Afterwards, I quickly grabbed some snacks, reloaded the troops in the car, and took off for the Verizon store that I had driven past a hundred times before.  I walked in with the twins strapped into the stroller and Emmy and Hannah at my side, and explained how I had just lost my 18-hour-old phone out to sea and asked how they could help me.  As I'd imagined, there was no quick fix for this, which left Emmy and Hannah spinning donuts with the stroller while the twins simultaneously made it "rain" Cheerios.  I was so fried that I'm still not sure what "plan," I agreed to in order to get a phone and get out the door.  That excursion still haunts me.