Crazy Life

The day after we finished re-siding and painting the whole house, we packed up to leave for our several week journey up and down the West Coast. Luckily we found people to watch our house while away. After loading up the van with 4 adults, the kids, the cat, baby swings, bouncers, toys (you get the idea), we were off!

The next several days included stopping in Seattle for the night before heading down the coast to Brookings, Oregon. A friend allowed us to stay in their lovely condo for a couple of nights. Most of the time it was pretty foggy, but what a beautiful place! Blake was a little scared of the ocean, but overall he had a good time.

Driving through the Redwood Forest was amazing. It's hard to fathom that some of those trees have been there for over a thousand years! From Brookings we drove to San Jose....it took us a total of TWELVE hours with the kids and when we finally arrived in San Francisco, after at least 10 and a half hours of driving, we got stuck in the middle of the city in an absolute gridlock. We must have sat there for over an hour and moved only a few blocks. Callie was screaming in the back, and Blake had done amazingly well until that point but then he lost it too. I will not lie...it was horrible. I will say that through all of this we are learning to be more and more flexible. Many nights we are up with the kids and it feels like we are constantly packing up and moving again, finding odd places for the kids to sleep and messing with nap and meal schedules...but we've made it so far.

We have been in San Jose for about a week, staying at Matt's sister's house, and it has been a lot of fun! It's a little tight in the house (there are 4 of us adults and 5 kids, not including the family that comes over during the day), but we've all been doing pretty well. We've had some pretty fun dinners with the whole family too....one night we had a Rwandese meal...last night we had an Indonesian night...yum yum!

So what's the plan? We are now in Oakland for a couple of nights with the entire extended family on Matt's mom's side, to hold a memorial service for his grandma Waite. Then we will head back to San Jose for a week and then leave to head back up the coast, eventually stopping in Seattle for several weeks.