We had a great time in Julian over Labor Day weekend, camping with my parents and our family friends, the Eccles. David’s parents joined us for the day on Saturday, too. We enjoyed the warm weather but swimming, hiking, eating, fishing, mini golf, playing Sequence and relaxing.

The place we stayed at, KQ Ranch, reminds of something out of a movie with all the activities they had lined up for the holiday weekend. The kiddos did great sleeping in the tent, but we also enjoyed the comforts of an air-conditioned motorhome.

And of course, no trip to Julian is complete without apple pie (and ice cream!)

When we got back, Alex, Angelina & Micah drove down and we had a Labor Day BBQ to extend the weekend fun a bit more.

Here are a few favorite photos…

There are more here in the album.

So, I’ve had all these great intentions of posting more regularly but I knew I needed to catch up on June first. Well, now that July is almost over, I guess it’s finally time to just wrap it up and move on!! So bear with this long post…

Father’s Day

We had a great Father’s day. It started with doughnuts at VG’s in Cardiff, followed by church, and then we headed out to Torrey Pines for a little hike with my dad. I loved getting to celebrate my hubby and my dad together! I love them both so much, and they are both such great dads. We missed having David’s parents with us because Jeri was sick but were thinking of Dan as well on such a special day. We are truly blessed in the father department.

Hiking was so fun. Gigi did a great job on her first real hike as a walker. She’s done several on david’s backpack but she really enjoyed checking everything out and seeing the views. Hiking with a little walker is much slower, but still fun.

Then we came home for a great dinner and ice cream for dessert.

Here’s the album with a few more photos.

Mom’s Birthday

We also celebrated my mom’s birthday this month. She was out of town for her actual day so we all met for dinner the next weekend (for some delicious seafood!). It was fun to celebrate her– she is an awesome mom and Yaya!!

Hangin’ With Old Friends

Another highlight in June was a visit from our good friends the Berrys from Portland. Dave was David’s college roommates (anyone remember the guy with 2 left shoes at our wedding?!) and our kids are pretty close in age which is fun. We went swimming, had good pizza, beer, and conversations, and even hit up a garage sale across the street before they left.

Oh, and I, for possibly the first time, finished a whole beer (!)– California Honey by Pizza Port.

The same week, I had another little college reunion with two of my college girlfriends, Shannon and Kelly. Our babies are all really close in age and we had a fun pool playdate at my parents’ pool! Shannon was here for about a month and it was fun seeing her and her fam a few times.

Oh, and here’s our new solution to the pool causing the constant need to potty.

Here are all the random June Photos.

oh, and here’s one more cute one of the kiddos…

And our photos of the day from June (click to visit my 365 project)…

whew. that was a lot. One more event to share from June, but I’ll do another post for that. Toodles!

We’re so stoked summer is here! Some friends of ours, Aaron and Michelle have a fun tradition during the summer- a BBQ at their place in downtown Encinitas every other Wednesday, complete with Corn Hole, good food and friends. We’ve gone twice now for a fun, summery time.

At the beginning of the month, Gigi, Brody and I headed up to Temecula to meet Granny, Tammy and Michael for some blueberry picking. We had lots of fun and the blueberries and honey we got were delicious. After the farm, we headed to a delicious Mexican food lunch in Old Town Temecula.

We had a fun Bennett Family get together at David’s aunt’s house this month too, to celebrate his cousin’s college graduation. Gigi loved getting to swim and hang out with the doggie, Lola, and all the cousins’ kids.

Here are all the photos from Early June.

Here’s a look at November (Thanksgiving to come in another post).

The biggest event was the launch party for the company David works for, Elliptigo. It was a really fun party, complete with amazing food, beer and coffee, and test rides. My parents, David’s mom, and friends Rena & Risa all came to celebrate.

We also went out to a SDSU football game with our friends and TCU-almuni members, the McNaughtons. Gigi is buddies with their little girl and we have a lot of fun with them. David and Ryan are two peas in a pod when it comes to passion for sports. Now Gigi loves to cheer “Go Frogs!” while trying to make the little frog hand signal, and wave her purple and white pom-pom. Maybe we have a future TCU attendee on our hands?

We had a new family move into our neighborhood and now have 3 2-year olds on the block– Gigi loves her little neighbor friends. We also found out that one of our neighbors is the sister of a long-time family friend/firefighter. Small world!

Here’s a little slideshow of the month’s photos… (if in a reader/email, click over to blog to view)

October was a busy month for us! Here are a couple of photo slideshows to showcase the month. (Make sure you click over if you’re in a reader or your email inbox).

We had a great time at the pumpkin patch early in the month and then a fun Halloween party with our awesome friends.

Here’s the rest of the October photos, featuring a couple of picnic dinners at the beach, the anual pancake breakfast at Papa’s fire station, a fun birthday party, and some other random things.

So we’re officially the same age for the next four months as David finally turned 28! We had fun celebrating him with some of his favorite things. We started the day with a gift of Mountain Dew and then breakfast at the Original Pancake House… YUM.

In the afternoon we had a little picnic dinner at Moonlight Beach with some friends– old and new. It was super fun, despite the thick fog.

After church the next day we went bowling with the family– both sets of parents and Alex and Angelina, too.


Have you ever seen anything as cute as toddler bowling shoes?!

Here’s a slideshow of the events.

Finally, summer arrived in full force! We’ve had great hot weather the last couple of weeks and have been enjoying summer immensely.

First, you can take a quick look at how we’ve been savoring it.

Then, enjoy a few more photographic treats here…

And finally, if you like, you can look at all the fun we’ve had this past month.

xoxo.

I’m realizing that this family blog idea may be sort of going obsolete for us… what with almost everyone I know on facebook and my personal blog (and our baseball blog). So I think I’m going to simplify things for myself a little, to avoid a little redundancy. I still want to keep this blog as sort of our family’s diary, since facebook is way too chaotic to keep track of everything I post there. I think I will post here at least once a month with little photographic update as to what we’ve been doing.

If you’d like to keep up with the day-to-day fun stuff that is our life, which we would love for you to do, then here’s how you can do that:

Friend us on facebook (click for Nicole; click for David)

Read my personal blog (you can also subscribe by RSS/reader or by email)

Read our baseball blog (you can also subscribe by RSS/reader or by email)

Be our contact on flickr (when you sign in, if you scroll down there’s a link to what we’ve recently uploaded)

Come visit us at our new place in Encinitas (starting Sept 1!)- more info coming soon on that.

Otherwise, for the few of you who still read this, stay tuned for monthly updates at the end of each month!

xoxo

We spent the next leg of our trip staying with our friend from college, Nick, in Alexandria, Virginia, which is just a Metro ride from Washington, D.C. Since Gigi knows my dad’s name is Nick we had to tell her that this was a new Nick, not Papa. We all got a kick out of hearing her call him “new Mick.”

We got to see the historical landmarks that we  saw as a kid (5th grade for me and 8th grade for David) but of which we didn’t really remember much. Seeing the war memorials is pretty impressive. The new WWII memorial was really cool (we saw it at night) and made me think of my grandpa and we also saw the Iwo Jima statue at dusk which was neat. We didn’t go to the Vietnam Wall this time (didn’t want to have to try to keep Gigi quiet at such a solemn place) but wanted to give a shout out of thanks to David’s dad and Angelina’s dad for their time served in Vietnam (side note: oddly enough, they both went out of the same internment center in L.A.).

A major rain storm prevented us from seeing the Capitol building other than a drive-by photo op and also gave us quite a rain delay at the Nationals game we went to, but otherwise we had pretty nice weather and were able to do a lot of sightseeing and even go to the National Zoo, which is free!

We left Washington, D.C. to make a quick stop in Baltimore, long enough to walk around the Inner Harbor and go to an Orioles/Mariners game. As usual, there were many local Japanese fans there to cheer on Ichiro.  One of the recognized Orioles players’ number is shown below, #5, Brooks Robinson. You may be wondering why David has the sad face– my dad has a glove that was our old neighbor’s which is autographed by Brooks, but my dad (and our neighbor before him) has always played catch with it! David likes to give my dad a hard time about it–  I think he believes the glove should be in a glass case or something.

After the Baltimore game, we made the insane drive from there up to Poughkeepsie, New York, arriving around 2:30 a.m. to crash my parents hotel room. This might sound like an extreme drive, but it was worth it for a free night’s stay (thanks, Mom and Dad!) and to get to see my cousin’s graduation the next morning! We were so proud of Breanna as she graduated with her Bachelor’s from CIA– and no, I don’t mean she’s a spy. She graduated from the Culinary Institute of America! We had a delicious luncheon and got to tour the campus a little, and it is a beautiful place, right on the Hudson River. (Pictured below is me with my cousins, Breanna & Marissa.)

From there, we drove back south to New York City! More on that later, but for now, here are some photographic links for you!

• Alexandria, VA
• Washington, D.C.
• Games: Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles
• CIA Graduation

Our longest day of driving so far was last Saturday. After our relaxing time in Ladoga, we headed to Detroit, where we saw a game and stayed in a super posh and new Doubletree Hotel (yay, Priceline!) and the next day drove to Toronto. We liked Toronto and would have liked to look around the city more but we were only there long enough to grab lunch and watch a game.

From there, we crossed back into our homeland into New York and were able to see one of the most amazing American landmarks– Niagara Falls! We even scored a free parking spot (rare!) and were there after box office hours so we got to go up on the Observation Deck too!

We continued south into Pennsylvania, arriving pretty late into Willamsport, PA where we stayed the night. We happened to make a reservation at the motel that was right next to the Little League Headquarters and World Series Complex. We had hoped to go by and visit in the morning, but we didn’t know we’d end up being walking distance from it! David went a little ga-ga for the impressive complex, feeling some of his childhood dreams of playing there return for the moment.

After grabbing some Dunkin’ Donuts, we headed out to our next stop: Historic Gettysburg! This leg of our trip includes a lot of memories from our U.S. History classes over the years. The new visitors’ center at Gettysburg was impressive and we did a little walking to see the monument for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and a few others. I especially enjoyed this stop as I’m supposedly related to Robert E. Lee.

We then traveled the last few hours to our ultimate destination: Alexandria, Virginia, which is basically a suburb of Washington, D.C. We’ve been here for a few days, staying with an old college friend and seeing the sights. More on that later, but as you can see, in just 2 days, we went through 6 states in 2 countries {Michigan, Ontario, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia}! Whew!

Here are the albums:

• Niagra Falls
• Williamsport
• Gettysburg
• Games & photos in Detroit & Toronto