Bug lost a shoe at the beach the other day. We had walked a couple of blocks uphill away from the beach by the time we realized it was missing (she was sitting in the jog stroller), so I waited with the kids while Brenda went back down to look for the shoe. Annalie and Bug were having a fantastic talk about their wishes, mainly involving wanting the world to be made of delicious foods, so I scrambled for my camera and took a couple of short videos. They’re upside-down because I was trying not to interrupt the flow of their hilarious conversation.

Sadly, I missed taping the part where Bug was wishing the whole world were made of candy. Annalie informed her that if the world were made of candy, then she’d have to go to the dentist a lot. “Why?” Bug wanted to know.

“Because if you ate all that candy, then you’d get lots of cavities,” Annalie informed her.

Bug thought about that for a minute. “But I wouldn’t eat a LOT of candy every day, I would just eat ONE piece.”

“Then you should just wish for one special piece of candy every day,” Annalie advised her. “That way you’d enjoy it more.”

“Yeah,” Bug immediately agreed. “You’re right. I would just wish for one special piece every day.”

*Pah is Bug’s word for pacifier. She has pretty much stopped using pahs, but she remembers them fondly.

I know, I know! We’ve been here three days already and I have not blogged one little bit. But it’s because we’ve been having so much fun and taking so many photos that I have not had a single spare moment to write about it all.

Our direct flight from DC to LAX was uneventful and landed 30 minutes early. Good job, Alaska Airlines! And for the first time I brought along my iPod loaded with movies for Annalie to watch, which was awesome, and meant I had full access to my computer for the whole flight to enjoy the Gogo Inflight Wifi that I decided to splurge on. It’s kind of a kick to be online when you’re flying five miles above the earth at 500 mph.

After we landed, we caught a shuttle to the car rental place and picked up our car, which I had to call Sonja to find out how to start. It was a hybrid and I’d never driven one before. Luckily Sonja owns a hybrid and understood my crisis, having had the same problem when she’d first bought her car. (I had to insert the key, push a button, AND push on the brake.)

We got it sorted out and drove to Sonja’s house. We’d barely gotten our stuff inside when Brenda showed up with Bug, and she and Annalie had a joyful reunion. Then we went to IKEA and Trader Joe’s, because it’s traditional for some reason when I visit friends for them to take me to the grocery store first thing.

Back at Sonja’s house Brenda brought in her crafting supplies and we all did a top-secret craft that she’ll be writing about for her alphamom craft column soon. Sonja got a little carried away with the craft supplies and robo-ized her toaster. I love my friends.

Yesterday Sonja and I met Madge for lunch at a really fantastic restaurant where I wanted to order one of everything on the menu. Luckily, Le Pain Quotidien has a restaurant in DC! So I can go back there when we go home.

The one in DC probably doesn’t have an uber-cool sculpture/fountain outside it that kids are encouraged to play in, though. We might have to go back there before we go home, just so the kids can play there again.

Yesterday afternoon, Sonja needed to stay home with Noah and make sure he got a good nap, so Annalie and I went to the beach with Brenda and Bug! It was a gorgeous day for it, and we ended up staying for three hours!

It was warm but not oppressively hot. The waves were HUGE thanks to a storm brewing off the coast somewhere, but the tide was low. That created a big, wide shallow area where we could splash and play without worrying about getting dragged out to sea. It was awesome.

We had a great time, playing and relaxing. It was exactly what we needed.

Lots more fun ahead!

Photos from the Flickr photoset NC – VaBeach – Aug 2010.

The Tuesday before we left for Omaha, we headed back down to Southern Maryland to spend the day hanging out with friends. Angela and her girls were still in town from Indiana, and we wanted to spend as much time as we could with them before we left.

We went to the sprayground, we played at our friends’ house, we met everyone for a chaotic but fun dinner at Applebee’s where the waitress was awesome and earned her generous tip. And then, of course, we all went to get tiny cones on the boardwalk!

Well, some of us got regular-sized cones, but that’s okay. The kids are all bigger now than they were in the old days when we used to go get tiny cones together. The point is, we all enjoyed our ice cream.

The kids had a great time watching this mama duck and her duckling, who obligingly stayed close to the boardwalk the whole time we were eating. The little one would scamper up onto the rocks occasionally and send all the bugs scattering, but not before she caught one or two for a snack. It was quite entertaining.

The kids played on the playground, ran around on the grass, made silly faces, and just enjoyed being together.

I made silly faces myself at Miss Kate, and got her to smile for me. I love gummy, scrunchy-faced baby smiles!

I even remembered to grab a quick photo of me and Ang, for once. I rarely remember to get myself in any of the photos. I’m really glad I took this one, though, because I love it of both of us.

As we all started to leave, Gabby asked if she could take a picture of Annalie holding her baby sister. Then a few other kids jumped in, too.

We had parked by a small beach near the boardwalk, and as we all walked to our cars, Annalie noticed the sun setting over the river. She climbed onto one of the posts to sit and admire the view and exclaimed, “Isn’t it just beautiful!? I could sit and look at the river all day!” I don’t know where she gets this stuff, but I love it.

Even though that week was crazy and we had a lot to accomplish before we left for Omaha, I’m so glad we made time to spend a day with friends. It was well worth it.

After a busy day full of teaching dottery class and attending birthday parties, we hopped in the minivan and drove to Delaware, to the beach-town cottage where Anna and her family had just arrived the day before. We got there late, but Anna was kind enough to stay up and let us in before stumbling off to bed. We followed her example and went right to sleep, expecting all the kids to be up bright and early the next morning.

All three kids were kind enough to sleep in the next morning, not getting us up till after 7am. We ate cereal and pastries for breakfast and drank our coffee in a leisurely fashion while the kids played. Then we suited up and sunblocked everyone and headed for the beach!

It was so much fun! Since Annalie has lost her fear of the ocean, she loves the beach. And with so many adults there, she was able to play in the water as much as she wanted, only taking occasional breaks to play in the sand or have a drink. She had an enthusiastic water buddy in Anna’s son, J. They had a blast chasing the waves and each other around the beach.

But the best water buddy of all for Annalie was Troy. Dads are great when it comes to big waves that threaten to knock you down. They either grab your hand and haul you up quickly, sputtering and wiping salt from your eyes, or they just pick you up and swing you above the wave! Annalie loved doing both. I was kind of amazed at how many times she was knocked onto her knees or butt by a wave, yet came up laughing.

After a few hours in the sun and water, we were all hungry. Anna’s husband M and Troy, with Apple* tagging along, walked to a nearby pizza place and came back with some delicious pizzas that we devoured and two huge insulated jugs of soda plastered with the restaurant logo. Those cups kept tripping me out, because to me the logo seemed similar to an old logo for my favorite hometown pizza place. I’d see them out of the corner of my eye and be startled for a second before realizing it was a different logo entirely. Funny how that can happen.

*In case you’re wondering, Apple is not Anna’s daughter’s real name. It’s her blog name.

After lunch the kids went back in the water with the dads for a little while, but soon we were all ready to go home and cool off. So we packed up and made the short walk back to the cottage, where we enjoyed using the outdoor shower.

After everyone was cleaned up, M and Apple laid down for a nap. We got the big kids set up for some quiet time watching movies with the portable DVD player in the bedroom. Troy found something to watch on TV. And Anna and I decided, naturally, to go paint some pottery.

There happens to be a cool little craft studio on the main street of Anna’s beach town, and she’d been walking by and peeking in the windows for years, but had never gone inside. So we changed that! Anna had never painted pottery before, but she’d been painting houses for years, thanks to working for her dad, so she was a natural at pottery-painting.

I dotteried two little things, a star magnet for Melissa and a green bowl for Sonja. I was happy to find two little things to paint, because this particular place had a per-hour studio fee. I understood why—they’re on the beach, they probably have lots of tourists as customers and need to keep things flowing; and they guarantee your pieces will be fired by the next day, which of course means the fee will be higher than usual—but I still didn’t want to have to pay for more than an hour of painting! Also, we didn’t want to be gone all afternoon and leave Troy and M outnumbered by tired and hungry kids. So we painted, chatted, laughed, and walked back home.

On the way home from the craft studio, something funny happened: I was spotted in the wild by a blog reader! I didn’t know about it till we were back at home and she left a comment on a blog post. She wasn’t entirely sure it was me because Annalie wasn’t with me, I was in the wrong town, and she was a bit shy of saying hello to a total stranger. I emailed back in reply to her comment, saying I completely understood why she hadn’t said anything to me, but that I wished she had, that it would have been a hoot to have a blog reader recognize me on the street. I asked where she had seen me, exactly, and she emailed me back to tell me that she saw me on this street at that time by such-and-such building, and as it happened I remembered seeing her too! Crazy! For future reference, if any of you normal, friendly, non-stalker blog readers happen to pass me somewhere on the street, please feel free to stop me and say hello. I promise I don’t bite and I’ll even say hello back.

Photo by i am BeachMama

After our unknowing encounter with Miss Virginia, Anna and I continued home where we found hungry people waiting for us. We walked to a fun Italian place, where Annalie and J made good use of the play-dough I keep stashed in my purse for entertaining bored kids at restaurants while we’re waiting for food. Some of the TVs in the restaurant were showing an episode of Amen, which amused me greatly. I had completely forgotten about that late-80s show, both that it existed and that I ever watched it. But even without being able to hear the sound, I could hear the theme song in my head as the credits played.

We ate the delicious food, we walked back to the cottage, we packed up, we hugged our hosts good-bye and thanked them profusely for letting us crash their beach vacation. Then we headed home after a long, delightful weekend so we could start doing laundry and packing for our trip to Omaha later that week. We just don’t know how to stay in one place, do we?

The last weekend of June, we packed a lot of fun into a few short days. In addition to teaching the dottery class, we attended two birthday parties in one day and then drove four hours to the beach to hang out with Anna and her family, before driving three hours back home the next night. Whew! It was crazy but totally worth it.

First, we went to Karalyn’s 6th birthday party. It was a puppies-and-kittens party! The kids did puppy- and kitten-themed crafts and played games. The parents who hung out either helped as they were needed, pretended they were paparazzi, or hung out chatting, eating snacks, and passing around baby Kate.

Jill decorated Karalyn’s cake with an assortment of Littlest Pet Shop toys and candy bones, and there were also cupcakes with puppy and kitten toppers.

The weather was HOT that day, so the classic fill-the-buckets water relay game was especially welcome.

The party officially ended after a couple of hours, but we stuck around, eating Jill and Andy’s food and visiting with friends. It was particularly nice to see Angela and her girls, who had come from Indiana for a long visit just in time for the party. It was so nice to see them, in fact, that Angela and I lost track of time as we blathered away and we were late leaving for the next birthday party…

…for Jack! It’s hard to believe our adorable godson is already four years old, but it’s true.

We celebrated by climbing all over the PlayPlace and eating Happy Meals and Ronald McDonald cake and sundaes, because that’s the kind of birthday party smart parents plan when they have a tiny newborn daughter to take care of!

Did I mention the sundaes? They came with mini M&M’s and Oreo bits for topping. Those sundaes were a big hit.

Can you tell these two goofballs are related? They both posed like that, without prompting, when I pointed my camera at them.

Basically, a great time was had by all—what kid doesn’t love a McD’s PlayPlace?—and no one had to clean up their house or clean up after the party. Win! And with that, we said our good-byes and headed out to our minivan to make the long drive to the beach.

I was gonna write about the beach too, but this post is long enough and our trip to the beach deserves its own post. Standby…

“I love anything about mysteries. You know that!”
10:44 AM Jan 31st

“I love my butt, and I’m really glad to have one. It’s so useful!”
2:30 PM Jan 29th

“I crack myself up sometimes, didja know that?”
12:44 PM Jan 22nd

“I love looking at myself in the mirror. It makes me so happy, I wanna do a little dance!”
2:47 AM Jan 30th

“Hey, I’m eating standing up…cool.”
1:30 PM Jan 21st

“I’m glad God gave us thoughts. I like thinkin’.”
8:55 AM Jan 19th

I have a bunny right here, and she’s NOT made of dust. All right, she IS made of dust, I made her myself. But I painted the dust!”
5:47 PM Jan 18th

“Something tells me I’m gonna be a world-traveling girl. Except the North Pole and Antarctica, they’re too cold.”
2:41 PM Jan 17th

“I have to wear my red dress backwards because I want to pretend I’m Fire Nation.”
12:01 PM Jan 14th

“I’ll go take a show-er, Mis-ter Ro-bo-to, domo!”
6:59 PM Jan 13th

“I’m pretending that I’m a lifeguard and it’s my first day on the job, and it didn’t go so well. They kicked me out of the pool.”
4:00 PM Jan 12th

“I have 482 secrets. Maybe more.”
3:16 PM Jan 2nd

“You know me, I can’t resist quality food!”
8:09 PM Dec 29th, 2009

“I sure will miss Aurora’s cute open-eyes face.”
3:34 PM Dec 26th, 2009

“I require TOTAL SILENCE.”
5:53 PM Dec 21st, 2009

“Goooo, Chuck! Kick those baddies’ butts, yeah!”
4:51 PM Dec 25th, 2009

With our upcoming move, we’ve been in one-last-time mode for a while now. A couple of weeks ago after Bug’s birthday party we stayed the night at a hotel with Sue, Heather, Rapunzel & Superchic so we could get up in the morning and meet Brenda and Bug for doughnuts and lattes at the beach one last time.

Not like Annalie needs a special reason to go to the beach. This time, even though it’s January, I was smart enough to bring a swimsuit so the poor kid wasn’t doomed to wearing soaking wet clothes home. I did forget a towel though. Oops. Good thing Brenda had extras to share.

Rapunzel and Superchic didn’t have swimsuits with them, so they just rolled up their cuffs and tried to stay dry. The water wasn’t as cold as you might expect it to be in the middle of winter, but it wasn’t exactly warm. You wouldn’t think it would have been that hard for them to stay dry.

Of course that doesn’t take Superchic pretending to be a puppy into account. And we all know puppies love water.

Then there’s the fact that Rapunzel loooooves the beach and would happily camp there all summer long if she could talk her parents into it, I think. She has the same problem as Annalie, she loves the water too much to care about the fact that she’ll have to walk home in wet jeans full of sand.

Swimsuits or street clothes, all the kids had fun splashing in the water and playing in the sand. Sue and Brenda sat up on the lifeguard tower for a while, enjoying the view.

Heather and I mostly sat on the towels by the stroller and drank our lattes and guarded the doughnuts the kids were too busy playing to eat.

Bug wasn’t much interested in the water. She’s little enough and cautious enough to be kind of afraid of the waves. That makes life easier for Brenda, of course. If Bug is content playing in the sand or snuggling with Grandma, then Brenda is free to talk or read or sketch.

I, on the other hand, spent the morning calling out reminders to Annalie that she wasn’t supposed to go in the water deeper than her knees. Ever since she learned to swim and lost her fear of the ocean, she’s been so bold about going in the water. In the grand scheme of things that is awesome and I’m very happy about it; on the beach in mid-January I don’t want to have to charge into the water in jeans to rescue my kid, if I can avoid it. So we aim for the happy medium of knee deep.

All in all it was pretty much a perfect doughtnuts-and-lattes-on-the-beach day. The sky was clear, the sun was shining, the water was deep blue. We all knew that rainstorms were coming later in the week, and we were grateful to have such a gorgeous morning with friends before we go.

One of the things Lauren wanted to do while in California was watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. Where she’s from, she can only see the sunrise over the Pacific. We picked a good day to hit the beach, because the sunset we saw was stunning.

Brenda kindly took this photo of me and Annalie for our photo for Troy. We’re silhouettes, but I’m pretty sure Troy knows what we look like. Also, who cares about us with that gorgeous sunset behind us!?

Thanks for taking this photo, Mom!

To see more beach photos, and photos of our visit to Old Town yesterday that I haven’t had the chance to blog yet, go look at the photoset Lauren’s visit to SoCal in my Flickr.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or email, be sure to go to my actual blog to see the awesome new banner Brenda designed for me in honor of the Season 3 premiere of Chuck on Sunday, January 10th.

This past Monday morning I was in the kitchen doing dishes and Annalie was playing in the front yard when she saw a piece of orange paper slide underneath the front gate. She brought it inside to me so I could tell her what it was. I was dismayed to see that it was a notice from the city that our water was going to be shut off from 8am to 6pm the next day due to work being done in our neighborhood.

Having one’s water shut off for an entire day is never convenient. It’s even less so when you have company staying with you. Brenda and Bug were on their way to our house even as I read the notice, and we had planned Tuesday as a hanging-out-at-home day, with some cleaning and organizing before the vanilla party on Wednesday and a bunch of crafting Brenda wanted to get done. But we thought those things would be kinda hard to do without water on tap, not to mention how many times preschoolers and coffee-drinking moms need to use the toilet during a 10-hour span. We decided it was a good day to visit Sunny Jim Cave instead.

Photo taken by Brenda Ponnay

When we lived here in the late 90s we went to La Jolla Shores beach all the time, and we always meant to go see Sunny Jim Cave right next door to that beach, but we never quite got around to it. A good friend of Brenda’s used to live in La Jolla, so she used to hang out there quite a bit, but she hadn’t been to the cave in years. And Annalie and Bug had never been there, of course. It was decided: we were off on an adventure!

Parking around the beach in La Jolla is always crazy, apparently even in the middle of a weekday in November. We parked by Children’s Pool Beach and walked from there. It was about a half-mile along the footpath at the top of the cliff and through Ellen Browning Scripps Park, where we passed a large gathering of scuba divers just getting out of their gear and stripping off their wetsuits.

Along the way we spotted hundreds of pelicans, seagulls, and what I think were cormorants; and many, many harbor seals swimming in the water and sunning themselves on large rocks near the shore. Children’s Pool Beach isn’t really much of a swimming spot anymore, in fact, because of all the harbor seals who live in the area and contaminate the water with their waste. But they sure are fun to watch.

Photo taken by Brenda Ponnay

At the cave store we paid the entrance fees, and headed towards the stairs. We paused at the entrance to read the sign proclaiming that the stairs had been there for 100 years, and they were perfectly safe…but that anyone who chose to climb down the 145 stairs did so at their own risk.

Photo on left taken by Brenda Ponnay

As soon as we entered the tunnel that had been carved out of the cliff, the air was noticeably cooler. Walking all the way down didn’t take us very long, even though Annalie was slightly creeped out towards the bottom by the wetness of the walls and the stairs, and Bug usual pace might be called snail-like. There were pigeons flying around in the cave, and graffiti all along the wooden rails of the deck, and there was the cave opening in the vague shape of a man’s profile, and the blue water and blue sky beyond. We made it!

Photos taken by Brenda Ponnay

Annalie and Bug looked around for about two minutes and then…they were ready to go. It’s not like there were any rocks to climb on or anything, just a wooden deck and a hole for viewing the ocean. Not a big freaking deal to kids who live in beach towns, I guess! We headed back to the tunnel to make the 145-stair climb.

Annalie and Bug counted their steps as we went up. We didn’t start counting till around the 30th step, but Annalie kept on counting all the way to the top, which she reached a good 30 seconds before I did, and—since Bug insisted on climbing every step herself—a good two minutes before Brenda and Bug did.

Two minutes might not sound like long to you or me, but I suppose to a kid that might feel like an eternity. The picture on the left is the face Annalie was making as she told me she was boooored and ready to gohhhh. But as soon as I said, “Could you please smile for me, just for a second?” she willingly obliged.

It’s a good thing the walk back to the car was mostly downhill, because Annalie declared that her feet were too tired to walk, and I ended up giving her a piggyback ride much of the way. I think Brenda had to carry Bug some of the way too, so we were glad to stop and take a quick break in one of the gazebos that overlook the beach. Brenda took these awesome shots of me and the kids there. I especially like the one of me and Bug. For some reason, we don’t get in a lot of photos with each other’s kids. We should try to do that more.

By the time we left La Jolla, ate lunch, and stopped at Starbucks for an afternoon caffeine jolt it was only two o’clock, which meant another four hours to kill before they turned the water back on. But we had another destination up our sleeves to fill the afternoon…

…which you can easily figure out if you look at my Flickr stream, a certain photoset in particular.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which I may write after I write about the vanilla-making party Brenda and I had with Sue, Heather, Bonnie, Jen (but not Sonja, *sniff*), and assorted children. Or maybe I’ll write Part 2 first! You just never know with me.