The Four Blevins

Brian and I dropped him off at his class table in the cafeteria. He seemed happy to be there and ready for us to go, so we said our goodbye's and left. It's still a little heart wrenching, but it gets easier to leave him on his first day every year. I feel confident because he is at a school that he knows, he's with great people and he's been blessed with an awesome teacher each year. While he was at school, Hudson and I went to Wal-mart and got some stuff to make our annual first day of school treats (here's Kindergarten and first grade).
I divided up the cupcake batter and colored it so they would be rainbow. Reed thought it was great. :)
I was also privaledged to pick up sweet Em on her first day of school and treat her to a fun cupcake too. :)
Reed had a great day and I am looking forward to a great year.

On Wednesday we had a bit of a rest day. We slept in and headed out to play on the beach. The water was so cold, but the boys didn't seem to care. :)

Playing in the sand in front of the house.



Me probably trying to convince Brian to get in the freezing cold water. :)












We cleaned up for lunch at Ruby's Diner at the end of the pier by our house. It was neat. A cool view and the burgers were yummy.






We got these cool cars to fold and make into a car and trailer. It was pretty cute!





I don't know what we were doing to Reed here, but I love the expression on his face.


After lunch, they wanted to go play on the beach for a couple of hours. This next picture is how you can tell my kids are from Texas. They told me they were surfing.








We got cleaned up again and headed to Legoland for one last hurrah.


We rode rides very quickly- it was chilly and hardly anybody was there. We got some last minute souvenirs and headed out.

What a great trip- it was a full vacation, but we had a lot of fun and I think Reed will remember it forever.

Also, it's good to be home.

Tuesday we headed to Disneyland and California Adventure.. Gammy rode Dumbo with Hudson and Reed rode with DadDad - I couldn't get a picture of them because Reed was too short. :)

We saw a Jedi training school and stopped to eat lunch by itso we could get Reed in. They only picked a handful of kids and imstarted to think Reed was out of luck, the picked him. He was so excited.






I have some video that I will try to upload later. It was a really neat experience for him.
Over at California adventure, Hudson spotted "Queen and Mader".





We decided to ride this ferris wheel and as we were headed over to it, I noticed that a lot of the buckets were moving on those little oval tracks. As e wheel went around, gravity would make these thing slide down the line until it go to the curve and then they would just swing wildly back and forth. For every non- moving bucket (the ones around the perimeter), there were two moving buckets. Me and my motion sickness decided that as long as I was on a non-moving one, I should be fine. As we got to the from of the line for non-moving ones, they had someone cleaning puke out of one of the buckets. Ewwwwww. It was a neat ride, nut I don't know how those people could do all that rocking.





Here we are in our non-mover. :)





Before the bugs life 3-d show...





I didn't take many pictures and i'm not sure why. Anyway, we headed home that night exhausted from too much fun. :)

On Monday we ate IHOP for breakfast per Reed's request (again) and headed out to the zoo. It is huge!!

It had beautiful plants everywhere - the colors and variety were so pretty!





Lots of animals to see!


They had a cheetah in an enclosure with some dogs. They were put together to be playmates when they were babies. It was funny to watch. This white dog was a maniac- running around like crazy and playing with the cheetah. Pretty cool.








This camel had a hump that had flopped over. Weird.


Neither of the boys was tall enough to make these work, but I thought it was cute anyway. :)


We rode this sky thing across the park. It was a little high up and kinda scary, but you also had a great view of the park and surrounding area.


Reed had been asking to get his face painted, and all the kids who had it done looked so cute, so I gave in. He chose a spider...


Hudson chose the Lochness Monster. They were so excited!


They had a thing there called Joey Jumps (by the kangaroos of course). They hooked the kids up in these harnesses and they just went to town. I'll try to upload a video later- it was funny.





We had a very full day at the zoo and we didn't even see it all. When we got back to the house, the boys wanted to play on the beach. You can tell how overcast it is in the picture... It has been that way since we got here! Legoland had a little more sun, but not much. It seems the further away we are from the coast, the more sun there is. Anyway, Susan and I were in jackets and they were playing in the water. It was about 67 degrees.





Another fun day under our belts. We're having a great time!

We arrived in San Diego on Saturday afternoon. We drove to the beach house and my, my... It was awesome!!! This is the view from our living room balcony. It has been cloudy each day, so I'm waiting for a sunny day to catch and awesome sunset...

On Sunday, we went to Legoland. We stopped at IHOP (per Reed's request) for breakfast. On the way, I think Reed was about to jump out of his skin by how excited he was. He was so excited that he was almost yelling the entire day pointing out stuff to show us. Here we are at the gate. And yes, I still match my boys. I will do it until Reed gets embarrassed... Maybe I have a couple of more years.






We got there a little early, so we had to waste a little time up front near the gate. They had some dinosaurs and other neat things all made of Legos.





Other pictures of statues and things we encountered...


A triceratops...









DadDad and the boys with Lego Indiana Jones







We rode a few things- this rope thing was fun. You "pulled" yourselves up and then let go and it would slowly fall. Reed and I tried to race Brian and we won! I was pretty pleased about it until I realized he wasn't really even trying.






They had racetracks that the boys rode around on and received their Lego liscense. Hudson's was just an oval track.







Reed's course was a little more complicated. He had to stop at stoplights and stop signs. He had fun.







Lego Darth Vader.







Hudson hanging onto DadDad like a monkey. (Side story: I took Hudson to the doctor the day before we left because he had another abscess on his leg. He got on antibiotics, but those things develop rapidly and are VERY tender, so we have had to be careful how we hold him. Whenever anyone held him, we had to be careful with positioning so that we didn't hurt his leg. )






Me and my sweet boys waiting in line...






Lego Miniland. Awesome. They have built copies of all these cities and landmarks in Legos!! First we have Mount Rushmore. So cool!







Here is New York...







This was in the New York section... Can you guess what it is? The Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park! So cute!






Grand Central Station







The Star Wars section. Reed loved it. So did Brian :)

















All in all, Reed LOVED Legoland. He kept saying "This is the best day of my life" over and over. We had a great time.
Later that afternoon, we went over to The Sealife Aquarium. They evidently have a partnership with Lego, because they had Lego people all over the place. It was cute.











First time I have ever seen an octopus in person. It was... bizarre.


















Brian almost got eaten by a shark. :)





The boys holding hands. So cute!






It was a fun, but tiring day!