Badminton Babes

Once again, for her birthday, my friend Jetta hosted a big badminton tournament, dinner, and movie night.  I always look forward to this Ladies Night Out because there is sure to be a lot of laughs, a lot of good food, and for the past 2 years, a lot of crazy weather!

Hard core, competitive Jetta made us play out all the games in the rain.  And though my sports skills are sub-par, I was paired with my friend Anne, who is a PE teacher and all-around awesome athlete, so, we actually won the tournament!  Go Team "We Heart Shuttlecock"! ;) (I can't even type that without giggling.  Isn't that the dirtiest name possible for the pastors' wives duo?!)

Easter 2017

After celebrating Christ's victory over the grave with our beloved church family, this year we savored a lovey, quiet Easter at home.  Some Easters are full of friends and food and egg hunts.  This one was full of rain, naps, board games, a movie, and a fabulous ham and cheesy potato dinner.  It was perfect.

Here are a couple pictures of my flowers in full bloom and the girls in their Easter Sunday dresses...  

"He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 

‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’" Luke 24:6-7

Piggy Snuggles

Don't worry, even though not posted about for probably a year now, the furry members of our family are still alive and squeakin'! :)

They even took their annual field trip to preschool with me for Farm Animal Week!

Beach Days

As mentioned in a previous post, our San Diego days with Heather were bookended with beach visits.  Before leaving LA, we stopped and spent an afternoon at Hermosa Beach.  Our weather was perfect, with temps hovering in the upper sixties.  This was ideal for trekking around large animal parks, but kinda cold for busting out the bathing suits.  No boogie boarding for on this beach visit.  We found other things to do instead...

 Like hunt down this famous TV beach apartment!  Do you recognize it?  ;)

And get our pants just wet enough with wave hopping to require a change in the car.

Then, on our last day in San Diego, after dropping Heather at the airport, we spent a morning on the gorgeous Coronado Island.  Here we watched dolphins and marveled over the white, powder-like sand that massaged our toes.  We also made Bucket List plans to return to this super ritzy Hotel Del Coronado for a future vacation. 

After the beach, we started slowly making our way back home.  We first stopped in Camp Pendleton to have one last visit with our dear friends Lloyd and Heidi before they are soon moved to the NATO Base in Italy for 3 years.  We adults drank ice tea and caught up on their ocean-front patio while the girls ran all over the Navy Neighborhood with Lloyd and Heidi's kids, playing basketball, and checking in with walkie-talkies.  It's always fascinating to get a little taste of our friends' life and we wish them every blessing in their next adventure!

  

One more stop for dinner with newlyweds Anna and Derek, where we were able to sit for a few hours and recap all of the week's highlights, completed this fantastic Spring Break vacation!  We saw so many cool things and made so many great stops.  But, the memories we'll cherish most from this trip are all centered around the people we got to share it with.  Starting with meeting Andrew, to reconnecting with seldom-seen cousins, to doing vacation life with Auntie Heather, to getting to hug our friends, "Arrivederci", to reliving favorite wedding memories with Anna and Derek over artisan pizza.  This was a trip that was all about loved ones.  For having these amazing friends and family members in our life, we're counting our blessings yet again.

Safari Park

Though there are countless fun things to do in San Diego, we decided to get the discounted two-day ticket and spend a second day with the animals, this time in the equally awesome Wildlife Safari Park.  This too was a great day, and surprisingly really different than the zoo, though we still spent 9 hours in the park, once again walking 10 miles.

One of our favorite things to do was feed the lorikeets!  A small cup of nectar lured these pretty, brightly colored birds right onto your arm.  The last time we did this, the lorikeets were apparently starving and attacked us as soon as we entered their enclosure.  This time was much more peaceful and enjoyable...just a tad to Heather's disappointment! ;)

We had more wildlife land on us in the butterfly garden!  Ella was especially delighted that this huge Blue Morpho Butterfly landed on and stayed with her the whole time we strolled around here.

As you saw in the video, this park allows you to actually walk through the lemur enclosure!!  We weren't allowed to pet them, but to have them so close was so cool!

The apes, and their young baby, entertained us for quite some time.  I especially loved how the mom carried her little one around,  Dave had to give it a try.  The apes made it look much easier!

Another highlight of this park was the SUPER up-close lion encounter we had!  This is glass, but the lions were hanging out right by it...roaring, fogging it up, and spraying Delia right in the face with pee!  Notice her hat and clothes?  We joked that these lions must not have been Cubs fans.

The headline attraction here is the 30 minute tram ride though the open air fields, where animals roam freely and interact with one another as they would in the wild of Africa.  We rode this multiple times and enjoyed different guides and animals doing different things each time.

This park is all about conservation and bragged about how their efforts have brought several species in the wild back from the brink of extinction.  While we were there, they had 5 condor eggs ready to hatch!  It was neat to learn lots of new things while having these up-close animal encounters, in a land that was designed to transport you to another continent.  

We used much brain power and treads on our shoes over these two days! We had to end another exhilarating, but exhausting, day of animal sighting with a Footsie Wootsie massage.  Still just a quarter! :)

Fun Zoo Videos

Call the little ones over!  Here are some of our favorite videos from our day at the zoo!

A hungry koala bear climbing all over his tress to get the eucalyptus.

A hippo swimming (walking really) underwater.

Crazy chimps ganging up to catch a wild squirrel in their enclosure.  Don't worry, we never saw them catch it, though they got it by the tail a few times, they always let it go.  We think they were just playing.

Ella having a conversation with an exotic bird.

Actually from the Safari Park-- we got to go inside the lemur home!  The lemurs were walking right past us!

San Diego Zoo 2017

 My sister loves animals just as much as, if not more even than, we do!  When planning a SoCal Getaway with her, we knew a day at the unlike-any-other San Diego Zoo, which she has never seen, was a must.  After a stop at LAX to drop off Andrew, a few hours at Hermosa Beach (which I will write about later), a delicious meal at the Cheesecake Factory, and checking into the hotel we'd all share, we were ready for some animal adventures!  This is our family's 3rd trip to this world class zoo, but we are nowhere near tired of it!  Each time you visit is totally different because the attractions are living creatures completely capable of surprising you!  On this trip, every animal seemed especially active and interesting to watch!

We know to head to the koala area first.  These snugly sweethearts, which are my favorite, spend 23 hours a day sleeping, but when the zoo opens, they are being fed and are at their most active.  They were putting on quite the climbing show for us!

Delia would not let us wait too long before we visited her favorite part of this zoo-- the pandas!  They too were just being fed and were active and fun to watch.

 Delia was in Panda Heaven.  Though she put in more than one request, I was proud of her for being able to walk out of the zoo without yet another panda stuffed animal. ;)

 After my favorite and Delia's, we decided to make sure everyone else saw their favorites too.  Ella loves sloths, and though we were able to see this slow-moving wonder, cradling a baby even!, I could not get any good pictures of her.  

 Auntie Heather loves the hippos.  We even got to see one of them swimming underwater!

 And Dave always gets a kick out of the entertaining primates.  Each habitat we visited kept us captive for a long time.  The apes had playful babies.  This impressive orangutan dad was checking Dave out!  And the chimps were chasing a wild squirrel around their home!

There are so many things I love about this zoo: its massive variety of animals, the beautiful setting built around each creature, and how close up you feel (even through glass)!  Ella shared some kisses with this penguin.

 This is as brave as I will ever get with a rattlesnake.

 This goat was a fan of Heather's drink.

 We had a staring contest with these fascinating elders of the Galapagos Islands.

 And the girls got nose-to-nose with a tiger!

The SD Zoo is not for the weak!  We walked 10 miles on this day and spent all the way from open to close, 9 hours, at the park, still barely seeing everything.  I love that the time and miles slip right by, though, because the landscaping is just so lovely!  There are multiple aviaries in which to slow your pace and just take in the beauty.  In one aviary, Heather spotted this tiny hummingbird on a nest!  When it flew away, we saw that it had a teeny egg in there!

With all those miles hiked, we like to take advantage of the free double-decker bus and sky buckets that move you from one end of the zoo to the other.

We were so happy to share this zoo day with Heather!  We'll remember swimming hippos, hungry koalas, baby monkeys, grand tortoises, cuddly pandas, the porcupine that sneezed and almost killed us, and crazy old Loretta forever!