Weekend in san Jose

Last weekend, Mark was traveling up north near San Jose for the State speech tournament. We were not looking forward to another long weekend without dad, so he convinced us to come along! We had a great time exploring the area.

Friday we found a tremendous children's museum. After several failed attempts to ride the train there, we ended up driving and all of the kids loved it. (if you are ever in that area, we highly recommend it)

Christian's absolute favorite part was the water play area. It was a huge area and there were lots of activities with water and balls- 2 of his very favorite things!

Aubrey's favorite part was doing art projects of making a corn husk doll and a boat (and painting her own face to look like a heart!)

Courtney loves to learn about new things, so this was a great place for her to have all kinds of discoveries. Elijah loved this area here, it had several ways to send a tennis ball through a maze of contraptions!

The picture at the top was one of my favorite moments, not only because they are all so cute and having fun, but it was the one time when I sat down and was not counting to see who I was missing and where everyone was! It was very short lived though, just as I was looking at this picture on my camera, I felt something on my leg and looked down to find Christian had decided he was done painting the wall and his new canvas was my jeans!

On Saturday, we went shopping at the nearby outlet malls where we found a great children's place outlet. Despite being asked by nearly every person we passed if these were all my children and being told in a skeptical tone over and over what a brave mommy I was to be out will ALL these children, I did find a Pearl Izumi outlet and get a great deal for the new spin shoes I have been wanting!

Sunday, we did not bring church clothes, and dad was going to be busy with the tournament all day so we decided to check out the beach at Santa Cruz. Despite very windy and cold weather ( well 60 degrees- cold by California standards!), we had fun exploring the beach area. Courtney made a kite out of seaweed and a stick, Elijah tromped through a little stream of water, Aubrey explored holes in the rock wall and collect various items from the beach and Christian was happy to chase birds!

Sunday night, we were excited to have dinner with dad and his students. After a long awards ceremony where dad's student took 11th place ( not bad out of the whole state of California), they all came back to our room and the kids got to stay up late to spend time with them. We headed back Monday morning. Dad went to the Winchester Mystery house, so he will have to do a post about that. We are glad that we got to go along!