Santa Barbara Beach Time

We also managed to enjoy some great family time on the beach while we were in Santa Barbara. We had a beach bonfire with fireworks Saturday night and a sunset stroll with the family Sunday night.

 

 

Thanks Rosie for organizing such a great weekend

Pool time

 We all stayed at my favorite hotel and enjoyed a lot of unstructured pool time.  Our family seems to be particularly fond of baby tossing.

The older cousins have graduated to tossing themselves into the pool

The older girls had a little mermaid time

And a few actually spent some time swimming

Nick sorted his goldfish

And the parents had a chance to visit

Alice's Baptism

Alice turned eight this year and planned her baptism on a weekend that just happened to be a perfect weekend for our entire family to get together in Santa Barbara to celebrate with her. The beautiful weather in Santa Barbara allowed us to hold most of the meeting part of the baptism outside under the trees.  Many cameras recorded the event, but these are some of my favorites from my camera.

The Primary age kids sang a song with varying levels of enthusiasm to Jay's guitar 

Alice was baptized in the same dress Rosie wore for her baptism

Afterward she wore a beautiful dress that Rise made for her

Alice was good about posing for a lot of pictures

I love the times when we can all celebrate together

 

China Camp

 We planned a week of kayaking down the coast.  We found a hotel in American Canyon that was central to several great kayaking spots. Our first stop Monday was China Camp State Park near San Rafael. We haven't been there before and it promised a fairly easy paddle for our first day. We had to wait for the tide to come in and cover the mud flats so we could launch. While we waited we wandered around the old shrimping camp, which was pretty interesting.

Finally we were able to get out on the water and paddled about four and a half miles around the bay.

We had a nice view of China Camp from the kayak

Unfortunately our view wasn't quite good enough to see the thief who broke the back passenger window of the car and stole Calvin's church clothes and all the clothes and gear in his biking bag.

The thieves were long gone by the time we returned, so we just decided to make an effort to get the car window replaced as fast as we could.  The best estimate we could get for replacing the window where we were was "possibly Thursday, but no promise." Realizing that we couldn't continue on our trip without being able to lock the car securely and we couldn't do that with a broken window, we gave up on our kayaking trip and headed home.