California - day 1

Rose and I just had an AWESOME (albeit exhausting!) mommy-daughter vacation to California!  After months of planning, we met up with one of my college friends (Mitra) who lives with her family (husband Kais, kids Liam-5 and Clara-8mo) in the greater Los Angeles area. As luck would have it, two of our other college friends (Anna and her daughter Ellen-4, and Katie and her son Muir-3) were also able to join us!   These are the same friends that I met up with in Las Vegas (sans kiddos) in 2014. :)

It was quite a full house, and Mitra was an incredible host. I'll spoil the suspense and tell you all that we had an INCREDIBLE time!

So let's start at the beginning:  Anna and Katie arrived with their respective kids late Friday night, and Rose and I arrived Saturday mid-afternoon...

But wait! Let's actually back up a little further. Because our vacation actually started Saturday morning, since it was Rose's first time on an airplane!!

We left plenty of time to get to the airport since we had to park at my work and take the light rail to the airport. Incidentally, Rose thought the light rail was awesome!

We also left time to get lunch at the airport while watching planes come and go.

And we even left time to burn off energy before our four hour plane ride. I had expected she would want to go to the mini playground, but instead she was enamored with the moving walkways! We spent about 45 min riding back and forth, back and forth.

She was SO proud of herself when I let her do it "all alone" (i.e., 50 feet in front of me, instead of 5 feet away).

And then it was time for one last pre-plane selfie...

...and time to board!

She was SO excited to be on a plane!!! We see them flying over our house all the time, so this was a huge deal for her.  And she did great! Of course it got a little boring after four hours (although not boring enough to actually nap, as I had hoped), but she kept herself busy with her doll, coloring books, princess books, and stickers. 

She was a little nervous about landing, but even that she did great with -- as long as she was holding my hand as she watched :)

And then we were in sunny California! Rose was quiet as Mitra drove us to her house, as she generally is with new people. But once she and I were alone to unpack a little bit in the bedroom we would be using, she kept saying "I'm not wearing pants! Just shorts! And no socks!"  She was loving how warm it was. Such a mini-me :)

Given the big time change for us (everyone else was already on Pacific time), we had all agreed ahead of time that we would just hang out at Mitra's house on Saturday evening. It was no trouble at all to keep everyone happy with the big pool in the backyard!

Thankfully Kais took this one photo of all of us in the hot tub, because we never managed to get everyone in the same frame again after this!

After dinner it was a late bedtime for us! (7pm local was 9pm for us!)  I hoped Rose would sleep in a little the next morning...