California

After we went to California and Disneyland in January I swore I wouldn't take so many little kids on that "complicated" of a trip again.  When the opportunity came to stay with some good friends, Mike and Jennifer Badget in the home they have for the summer just minutes from the beach in Southern California I ate my words and did another road trip/amusement park trip.  It was really fun.  Still, totally exhausting, but staying in a home helped it to be less complicated and we had a few more "relaxing" days to balance things out.  

The Badgets have four kids, about the same ages as ours so no matter what we were doing the kids had a great time together.  Here we are at the Griffith Observatory with the Hollywood sign in the background.  We took the time to look through some of the telescopes.  It was a beautiful evening. 

Josh's favorite part of the trip was going out to a spot near the LAX airport right where the airplanes land and watching them fly over.  An airplane lands every 90 seconds.

We spent two days at the beach.  The kids had so much fun we literally had to hand feed them.  They were too busy playing.

 Cara was awesome at the boogie board.

Caleb and Josh loved the boogie board too.

John loved the sand until the tide came up and got him wet.  Note to self, keep the happy baby dry. He really did exceptionally well taking a long nap in the stroller and playing in the sand.

We took two days at amusement parks.  Jennifer was kind enough to keep John and Ali while we took the older three to Six Flags. We were defiantly not the ideal ages for for Six Flags, but we had a fantastic time.  There were no lines at the Bugs Bunny World so the kids loved that.  The out of this world roller-costers that we made it on were worth the trip. 

The carnival type rides didn't have lines either and the kids loved them.

We also went to Knotts Berry Farm.  It would have been fun, but it was really hot and the lines were super long.  The kids had fun on the rides we made it on though.

Johnny is such a great sport about everything that we did. Once again he gets the perfect baby stamp of approval. 

One day we took a day to rest and to go to the LA Museum of Natural History.  They had a special live butterfly exhibit.  It was fun to relax and enjoy the butterflies.

I don't know who we were kidding when we tried to get a nice picture of the kids at the end of the day in the rose garden, with the museum behind.  You get the idea that it was beautiful though, right?

This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip.  We were eating hot fudge sundaes and Johnny was crawling around when this group of people noticed him.  They stopped to talk to him and began taking his picture.  He had his modeling moment.