It just wouldn't be a real vacation...

...with out all of the following (or similar incidents).

After reading Julie's post about her summer so far I thought I would try to make her feel like she is not the only one....although I really can't match her week!

1. One trip to Urgent Care with a nice hefty deductible. At least this trip we got to take my sister's cool golf cart to the doctor. How cool is that? They made us wait for 40 minutes outside because the kids had an amazing, disgusting rash that covered them from head to toe...not chicken pox like we thought it might be...but simply "Hot Tub Folliculitis." Took about 10 days to go away. YUCK! My Sister and BIL are now clear about keeping their nice new jacuzzi properly maintained. Note: Never enter a hot jacuzzi that has that cloudy, not quite right appearance.



2. Skin Rash as stated above.






3. One gnarly bike crash causing cool looking fat lip, darn near a broken nose, and lovely scabs in all of the photos for the remainder of the trip.










4. No less than 4 carsick barf bags filled in the car. (We won't talk about my barf bag...not from being carsick.)



5. One adult drinking waaaaay too much wine waaaay too fast at Temecula Wine Festival and having to be drug out by DH and DSister...thank god there are no pictures of that! :)

6. Exactly 432 Evil Eyes shot from DD to DS and back over who's WebKinz gets to sit in the middle seatbelt and other irrelevant, won't matter in 10 minutes, drive the parents crazy kind of things.

Things I don't miss...

...about living in Southern California.

The past couple of months I've flown in and out of LA 3 three times. Every time I fly "back home" I have such a great time looking out the plane window and picking out all of the familiar old landmarks. Big Bear Lake in the mountains, then the towns along the foothills where my Mom was raised and where my Great Grandma lived, the 210 Freeway where I got my first (and only) speeding ticket when I was 16, the Marina where my Mom and Dad 1st met, the PV Peninsula where I used to work and hike down to the tide pools, depending on what side of the plane I'm on I will see the Forum where the Lakers used to play or the old LAX Theme Building, currently in major reconstruction. It is always a little thrill to see the bustling, busy 405 freeway (see below)...moving and flowing as if it was alive right before landing.

Don't get me wrong, I love living in the Midwest now where life is so much simpler and easier. But getting back to LA is always good for the soul. It is a quick does of that crazy fast paced world that I used to be a part of.

Now for the four big things I don't miss about living in SOCal....

1. Tons and tons of traffic, day and night. Never knowing if it will take 30 minutes to get 30 miles or 3 hours.

2. Graffiti, tagging, whatever you want to call it. I realize that to some this is an art form...but really, it gets old when everything in plain sight gets tagged.

3. Ridiculous gas prices. I mean seriously! We watched it go up 10 cents a day when we were there!


4. Smog glorious smog. It wasn't too bad this trip. But those gorgeous mountains that I miss so much and always used as my compass (mountains in the East, Pacific in the West) are almost always covered with a blanket of the brown stuff. Sean and I lived at the beach for three months before the air cleared enough in the Winter so we could actually see the mountains.

Army Eggs cont

After flipping the bread, let the egg whites fully cook and then serve hot.
Make a big deal when the kids pop the egg. :)
Yum!




Thanks Gran!

Army Eggs

Ok I guess these are really called Cowboy eggs? But my Mom made them for the kids on the last morning of our trip and ds decided they were called army eggs. So we thought we would share.

Warm some butter in a pan and break a hole in each piece of bread and put them in the pan.



Then carefully break open an egg in each hole so that the yolk stays in the center.

Cover the pan for a minute or 2 to let the egg set but make sure the yolk doesn't completely cook. I know I know, undercooked eggs can lead to salmonella infection. But the most fun thing about army eggs is "popping" the yolk in the hole.



Gently flip each bread so that the yolk doesn't break.

Scenes from SoCal 5

LOOK WHO I GOT TO MEET IRL!!!! Love this girl! I think she might have talked me into the cruise in January with Christine. Hmmmmmm. :)

Soooo happy to meet you Shirley!

Scenes from SoCal 4

Ahhhhh cousins....that's what it is all about. The kids have all of their cousins on my side of the family out here. There are 12 of them total. It is so good for me to see them all hang out together and get to know each other so well. They are even fighting like siblings! I always wished I could spend more time with my cousins growing up, but we all lived so far away from each other.







It seems like there is a palm tree with every sunset you see that isn't over the Pacific here. Even out in the desert.

Scenes from SoCal 3

One of my favorite beach towns in SoCal is Manhattan Beach. Great pier, shopping, vollyball and of course the strand. Love this place! The water is freezing right now but it didn't stop the kids from getting completely soaked playing in the waves. Ugh, sand and clothes, so not fun! So we hit the showers and headed South to my sister's house.

Scenes from SoCal 2

Sand Dune Park in Manhattan Beach is a perfect place to burn off a meal from Johnnie's Pastrami. This is a really cool park that is just a huge hill of sand for climbing up and then (the fun part) running down! The kids and Daddy had a blast. Of course I didn't do any climbing because, well, you know how bad sand is for a camera! :) Really, I should have. I know.

Scenes from SoCal 1

Back to Cali we go again!

Ahhhhh, the first place DH wanted to go after stepping off the plane. His most beloved Johnnie's Pastrami. He started drooling the second the landing gear went down. French dip pastrami and chili cheese fries are what he loves. This place is really cool, we used to love to come here late at night after a night of partying (before kiddos of course) when they had the fire pits going. Today it was a perfect sunny Cali day, I was so in awe of the beautiful light. DH was so proud of his little girl as she mowed down a bunch of pastrami AND the chili cheese fries with him. I'm thinking we will need a little exercise now!

2 Months Gone By

A little less than 2 months ago I had a very strange dream. I knew that the next day I was supposed to find out if the second in a series of 4 tests my Dad would go through would be positive for Lung Cancer. We were hopeful it would just be some bug they could knock out with antibiotics, not that dreaded C word again. My Dad was a 20+ year bladder cancer Survivor. He showed extraordinary strength beating it so long ago. Little did we know that the tough chemo drugs he was on 20 years ago that helped saved his life also damaged his heart. It weakened his body but not his spirit and we have always felt so lucky to have him all of these years.

My dream was incredibly vivid, in full color and very strange. All of my back teeth were falling out. It wasn't painful, I wasn't even really disturbed by what was happening to me in my dream. I remember being a little upset but only because I would have to go through some major dental work to get them fixed. I could just touch them and they would fall out and I would have a mouthful of teeth. I remembered it so well the next day and was so perplexed by it I had to look it up on one of those silly dream interpretation websites. It wasn't hard to find and it wasn't something I wanted to hear. I read one...then another and another...they all said basically the same thing: Someone would die, brace yourself for something bad to happen. So I did. I will probably be amazed by this dream thing for the rest of my life.

It would take another week, and 2 more tests but the Dx would finally come: Stage 4 Lung Cancer. They did a couple of rounds of a newer, gentler chemo which seemed promising to gain us some time and help relieve his coughing. I got to go out to see him for four days and all of my siblings were there. He was clearly in a lot of pain, very weak, and had so much trouble just catching his breath to talk, but it was all so normal and nice. We spent some time talking and just "being" together. Julie gave me the greatest advice ever...to just be in the moment with him...I am so glad that I did. The night before I flew home we all sat down to dinner together. Mom, Dad my sister Karen and myself. No kids, no spouses, just us. Just like we had so many hundreds of times before growing up. It seems kind of surreal now but it is something I will hold on to forever. When I finally got home at midnight that next day I called Mom to check in and Dad was in the ICU.

The chemo had started to shrink the tumors but his poor old heart just couldn't take it. It finally gave out on May 4th, a totally mixed blessing that he wouldn't have to suffer the inevitable suffocation and pain from the lung cancer but so hard for us to lose him so quickly.

I flew back out the next day to be with my Mom and my sisters. We had a beautiful little get together in his memory called a "paddle out." No funeral for this man, he would never like that. All of his 5 kids and 12 grand kids were there to say goodbye in our own way. His 2 oldest grandsons paddled a beautiful wreath out to the reef on their surfboards and we all sent messages to him tied to balloons. It was beautiful and comforting but I will miss him dearly and I am so sad that my kids had so little time with him. I'm still not sure I am believing it all, it happened so quickly. But hopefully that's just because I don't feel he is totally gone, his presence is still stong, he's still my Dad, and he will always be with me.