Thursday, June 16, 2011

Skye's actual birthday was filled with more presents and family.
I actually took time to make this present look nice and pretty!

We went to Boondocks the night of her birthday. They have this special for your birthday where you get to do all these things for free. Skye was really looking forward to riding on the go-karts with Lance and playing some miniature golf. Unfortunately, it was the night of that freak storm so pouring rain made it impossible to do any of those things.

We still managed to have a good time, though, eating pizza with my family, opening presents, and playing games.



Once again, she got some really great presents!

This is one of her favorite games at Boondocks.


Overall, it was really fun birthday for our now four-year-old girl! It was so cute--just after she woke up the morning of her birthday, I told her happy birthday and that she was no longer three, she was now four. She was all excited, then put her hand to her heart and said, "I can feel my birthday in my heart, Mommy." I can't believe how she's grown up! But just as cute as ever!

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Happy 4th Birthday, Skye!

I've gotten way behind on blogging. Rather than try to catch up (which I may still do eventually), I decided to start with the latest event which was Skye's 4th birthday. She had her first ever birthday party with friends a few days before her birthday. My mom got this beautiful cake from Sam's Club.
She invited 8 friends and all but one of them came so it was a bit crazy! We had one game and a craft and they spent most of the rest of the time just playing. I was so frazzled, though, that I barely even got any pictures. I wish I would have gotten a good picture of all of them together, but I completely forgot. Here she is opening some presents.

And here they are getting ready to eat cake. They all wanted a piece with a flower (frosting) on it and most of them just ate the frosting! Even though it was crazy and went by really fast, it was a lot of fun!

Since she invited boys and girls, I decided we shouldn't have a girls-only themed party. Since Skye loves animals (loves would be an understatement actually), I asked her if she wanted a wild animal birthday party. She thought that was a great idea so we got animal decorations like these animal candles...

and these fun things! We played an animal game and then made animal paper bag puppets.

Here she is with all her presents. I would say she got spoiled. She got some great presents that have taken up much of her time recently--what every mother wants!


Lance Body Surfing!


Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Playing at the Beach

Fun at the Beach

Our last afternoon in San Diego was spent hanging out and having fun at Pacific beach. Skye spent a lot of her time digging in the sand and making sand castles.
The beautiful Pacific Ocean! Who doesn't love the ocean?!

Another fun activity was searching for shells. Skye had been waiting to find shells on the beach for years! The tricky part was that all the good shells were hidden under the water. You had to wait for a wave to head out to the ocean to hurry and pick them up before another wave rolled back in. It became quite an adventure especially when high tide started coming in!

Skye met this other little boy and they spent a long time together building and rebuilding (when it got knocked down by waves) a big crab house. They called it that because there were billions of miniature crabs all over the beach. Anytime we'd dig into the sand, it would unearth these crabs that would quickly burrow back down under the dirt.



The beach was Lance's favorite part of our whole trip. He had a great time body surfing and I had a great time getting pictures and video of him! Honestly, the beach was probably really Skye's favorite part of the trip, too. We should have spent more time there.

I couldn't believe the detail I could see of this boat once I got the picture of it. It was actually pretty far away, but the zoom on the camera did its job!

We often saw these big sea birds flying over in formation. None of my picture really captured just how cool they looked, but here they are anyway.



If we hadn't had Skye to keep an eye on, I probably would have gone out in the waves with Lance, but there was no way I was going out by myself so I just had fun jumping little waves with Skye!



Our happy girl.


Monday, June 13, 2011

The San Diego Zoo

Our fourth day in San Diego, we went to the San Diego Zoo. What a disappointment. It was just a zoo like any other zoo, but cost three times more than any other zoo. We definitely won't be going back there the next time we go to San Diego. I'd much rather check out the wild animal or safari park.


Honestly, Skye's favorite parts were climbing on all the animal statues...









Playing at the playground...

Oh yes, and looking at the snakes, as usual!

You have to admit, this is a cool snake! Have you ever seen scales like that? It was pretty amazing.



This bird was pretty neat, too. And it hung out for quite awhile like it was posing just for us.

One of the animals Skye was excited about seeing was the hippo. The last time I was at this zoo (7 years ago), there was a mom hippo and a baby hippo and they were swimming around, up and down, and it was a lot of fun to watch them. This hippo just sat there. Not very interesting.



It was probably more fun climbing on the hippo stature than watching the live, sleeping hippo.

These are Lance's favorite animals to see.
Here's a slightly better shot of one.



Skye insisted that I get a picture of Lance with one of these masks!

And that was our day at the zoo. Luckily, we ate lunch and left before Skye could repeat another meltdown. We went back to the hotel, took a nap, then headed for the beach!

Sea Lion Videos


Friday, June 10, 2011

Saying Goodbye to Sea World

One of the last things we did our final day at Sea World was to catch the Sea Lion show. It was definitely my favorite show because it was the most entertaining. This guy kept everyone laughing until the show actually began. The show was themed after different T.V. shows. This one was a take on CSI, but instead was Sea Lion Investigation.
The sea lions were great!

Here's Dancing with the Sea Lions.

I have some good video of the show I'll have to put on next.

Who would have thought we'd see this cute, little bunny at Sea World?!

We enjoyed this sky ride in the afternoon.


Skye was happy to see a killer whale close up!

What an adventure Sea World turned out to be! I definitely look forward to going back someday!