Proof that I have another brother

Mitch and Jamie stopped by for a few minutes to say hi and see the girls. It was great to see them!

Playground fun

The best breakfast food is found at King's Hawaiian Restaurant in Torrance, CA. 

I'm sure you've seen those packages of King's Hawaiian sweet rolls at the grocery store. Their bakery is in southern California. And they have just one restaurant, which happens to be walking distance from my parent's house. Now picture that nice round loaf of sweet bread turned into french toast topped with powdered sugar. Serve that up with maple or coconut syrup and sides of eggs, bacon, sausage, and potatoes. Wash it all down with a glass of P.O.G. (passion, orange, guava juice). So good! Well, I didn't say it was good for you, but it's definitely good on the palate. 

My family! (missing my brother & family in Shanghai, nephew on a mission, and other brother & wife)

After breakfast we walked to Hickory Park. This awesome playground was just outside my elementary school fence. So much cooler than the playground on campus. The very old rocket ship is still there and still the best feature. We hung out in the shade while the kids played for more than an hour.

After we said goodbye to my sister and her family, we borrowed my parents car to drive down to Orange County to meet some friends from high school. The girls jumped in the back seat. They soon were asking us what that thing on the door was for. Puzzled we turned to look at what they were talking about.

It was the hand crank to roll down the window!

Yes, the girls have grown up in an era of automatic windows. 

Emma laughed and laughed as she rolled the window up and down. 

We decided to meet up with my friends at a park so that all the kids could play. There were a lot of kids between us! My best friends Rachel and Cathy, and our families.

Venice Beach

Clay flew in on Friday to join us for the rest of our family vacation. It was a beautiful day and we decided to go walk around Venice Beach.

Here my sisters and I are having a good laugh trying to be taller than each other. 

There was a fun playground that the girls enjoyed.

We walked by Muscle Beach, but there wasn't much going on there at the time. 

There was also this really cool skate board park. We stopped and watch some really talented kids.

Walking by the shops in Venice Beach is not for the faint of heart. 

There are all sorts of smells and sights that you don't find in quiet suburbia. The girls were a bit dumbstruck. But not so much that they couldn't find voice to a few questions that took quite a bit of care to explain. One of the most numerous shops was the Green Doctors. For just $40 you can get legalized medicinal marijuana. All you have to do is give them an excuse by admitting to any number of maladies. Just for fun, Clay and Layne went over to see what kind of questions they asked to qualify for a medical need. When they came back Clay triumphantly announced, "Heidi you would qualify with just the first few questions!" Nice.

Now, just take a  moment to contrast the craziness of the Venice Beach Walk with the beautiful and peaceful scene of the Venice canals just a few blocks away. I didn't even know these existed!

I would love to own one of these homes! But I'm not sure I would want to live so close to the crazy stuff.

Back to walking along the beach.

Apparently this is the World's smallest front yard. I haven't verified it.

We were mesmerised by this bird's nest/treehouse home.

The cousins liked this purple house.

In Venice Beach you can also find mounted police.

Emma loved this pink mustache. Well, except that it was pink. Any other color and she probably would have bought it. We even saw a few cars with giant fuzzy pink mustaches on the front. Turns out it's a ride sharing service. You can request a ride through an app on your phone. www.lyft.me 

Magic Mountain

Our nephew Braxton was dying to go to a real amusement park while in southern California. He decided it had to be Magic Mountain. My girls really enjoy roller coasters too. And we wanted to spend time with everyone. So we went.

First ride of the day was Scream. My sister was demonstrating what to do on the ride. :)

 Rebekah enjoyed riding on Goliath. The ride takes you up to 255 feet and then does a 61-degree drop into an underground tunnel. Yeah, I don't like that stomach-in-your-throat feeling.

 Rebekah's only limitation was that she was only 48 inches tall. She was not tall enough to go on all the rides she wanted to. But if she COULD go on, she did. And had her hands up in the air laughing and giggling the whole way! I took the girls on a classic -Roaring Rapids. We were completely soaked when we got off the ride.

This photo reminds me of when I was 12 and my dad took my friends and I to Magic Mountain. We also took a picture of ourselves soaking wet on this ride. 

Rebekah's absolute favorite ride was X2. Here we are innocently waiting in line. The next pictures show innocent victims riding up the roller coaster, reclining on their backs, with no view of where they are going...

The thing about this ride is that they do a good job of hiding the actual track from your view while you are waiting in line. I was starting to get a bit nervous about it. What I didn't realize is that the seats rotate around at different points during the ride. Well, here's a video to help you appreciate how it felt.

Needless to say, flying face first down to the ground with all my weight against the safety restraints nearly SCARED ME TO DEATH! And here I was sitting next to Rebekah, little 6 year old Rebekah, who on every other loop de loop ride had her hands in the air laughing the entire way. Not on this ride. She wanted to hold my hand as we started going up. She did not make a single sound on the entire ride, just kept a death grip on my hand against her shoulder restraint the whole way. I started panicking. Fearing that she was going to be traumatized for the rest of her life. That she was sitting right next to me crying and just as scared as I was. That I was the worst mother in the world for allowing my 6 year old to go on this ride. I started praying that she would recover from this experience and asked forgiveness for my irresponsibility. 

When the ride finally stopped, I help my breath. I heard Rebekah take in a gasping breath and then exclaim "That was AWESOME!!" She asked if she could go again. She told everyone that X2 was her favorite ride of all.

Day at the beach

My sister, Heather, and her family drove down from Utah to spend time with us. I'm sad that we missed my nephew, Tanner. He wasn't able to come with them as he just started serving a mission for our church. But I am so proud of him go going! He just turned 18 in April and just graduated from high school in June. He entered the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah on July 3 and is serving a mission for the next 2 years!

It was a beautiful day so we thought we would go down to the beach. It is only 4 miles from my parent's house to the beach. We went from beautiful to sunshine to a very thick gray marine layer and lots of wind at the beach. Without the sun it was very cold. We all ran back to the car to get our hoodies.

We went in to the Amusement Park. Everyone had a great time on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Rebekah had her hands up the whole time just laughing as she got spun around. (More on that in a later post.)

When we got too dizzy, we took the group outside. We enjoyed walking around the shops and looking at the live crustaceans. 

The girls still wanted to hang out on the beach and play in the water.