Mission Beach Love

My sister and brother in law have been staying in a beach house on Mission Bay for the past week. Yesterday Dama Shan, the boys and I went down to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I was really excited to go and hang out with them for the day. Sometimes I get something in my head and the expectation of it happening gets away from me. I get super, almost irrationally excited and often times the reality of the experience cant compete with what I had built up in my mind. Yesterday fulfilled all my expectations and more. We had SUCH a great time! I want to live there with my extended family forever. ha ha. Seriously, it was so much fun! I loved casually hanging with my sister and her family. I loved the sun, surf, bikes, kayak, boogie boards and sand dollars. I loved that Mom, Dad, Miranda and Matt came over after work to have pizza and beer on the patio. I love that Dama Shan was here to be apart of the love fest. I want to go back and do it again everyday until school starts.

This morning when I got up, I began looking through the bagillion pictures I took. I came across these few and had to post them immediately.

I love these kids and I love these pictures. My mom is going to be so giddy happy when she sees these today - her four grandkids all together.



Thank you so much Jen and Barry for having us. I enjoyed you and your hospitality so much. Love you tons!

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Edited: Im going to add more pictures throughout the day as I find more. I literally have hundreds.

I loved this one. My family was hanging out on the patio and this good looking lady skates by on the boardwalk with her dog. Look at Matt and my dad: they're totally checking out the DOG... not the good looking lady. Too funny.

When we showed up at the beach house, the tide was really low and there were TONS of sandollars (LIVE ONES) all over the place. The kids would wade around in the water and pick them up with their toes. They collected literally dozens of them yesterday. I have never seen so many live ones in one place before.



They also found this HUMONGOUS piece of seaweed in the water. Jen, Barry and I were tripping out at how large it was.

Eli and Abbey - looking all adorable:

Finn was quite miserable for the first 45 - 60 minutes we were there. Dama Shan hypothesized that his foul mood was brought on as a result of " videogame withdrawal." I agreed with her. However, Finn perked up as the day rolled on and had a really great time riding his bike. There is a wonderful boardwalk all around Mission Bay and Finn was quite fearless riding on it. We were all amazed. Ive been trying to teach him to ride a two wheeler for the latter part of this summer. I think we're close. As Matt mused yesterday "He can fly, but yet take off or land." Hopefully we can get those training wheels off soon.

Kayaking:

As I was taking this picture, Finn kept asking me if we could keep a bunch of the sand dollars he'd found. I would tell him no, but he'd keep pleading with me. We ended up bringing lots of shells home, but not a sand dollar. We released them all back into the wild.

Last one is of my sisters and mom with Abbey.