Trip to Orange County

Michael and I had a great, quick trip to Newport Beach, CA last weekend. Many thanks again to our various sisters for watching our kids. We stayed in a great little hotel called the Bay Shores Peninsula right at Newport Beach. Friday we went to Fashion Island (a fancy outdoor mall) and ate at the Cheesecake Factory (yum!), drove down to Laguna Beach, climbed on the rocks and looked at the tide pools, drove a little farther down the coast and explored the Ritz hotel, and stopped at Wahoo's Fish Tacos in Laguna on the way back to our hotel. That night I slept 10 hours! I couldn't believe it! Sat was so nice - just a lazy day. After sleeping in we walked from our hotel down the beachfront to Balboa pier and then walked back again. This worked up a great appetite for the local Crab Cooker restaurant. (yum again. Can you tell that food was one of the highlights of our trip?) That afternoon we thought we'd sit on the beach and read in the warm sunny weather, but the wind made things a little cooler than we'd hoped. Oh well, at least there wasn't any snow. That night we went to a wedding dinner at a nice cliff-side restaurant in Orange County - the main reason for our trip. We went home early Sunday. It was so nice to have a warm-weather getaway in the middle of February. Also nice to just have time to hang-out together. It's invaluable time!

Our cute little snowmen.

We have made more snowmen, forts, slides, etc this winter than in the past 10 years combined. We have definitely had the most snow we've ever had since living in Utah County. Good thing our boys love to shovel snow so much because we've also shovelled more snow than ever before. Thank goodness for temperatures warm enough to start melting some of it.

More Wintertime activities

As we endure the heaviest winter/snowfall of the last 10 years we've lived in Utah County, we're constantly trying to think of new activites to keep the kids entertained, to get us out of the house and to keep us all from severe cases of cabin fever. Here are a few examples:

A fun outing to the Aquarium with Aunt Meredith and her girls. Here the kids were entertaining themselves and each other playing that they were hiding from a shark while the grown-ups indulged in grown-up conversation.

Here is Spencer playing at the erosion table at the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point with his preschool class. David and I tagged along.