The First Snow and San Diego

We missed writing blog post for 2 weeks, so we are going to attempt to remember what happened during those weeks. 

Two weeks ago it snowed and the kids had a lot of fun time making snowmen and snow forts and playing in the snow and throwing snowballs. The snow only lasted a few days, however, we still were able to enjoy it quite a bit.

After the snow had melted, and we decided to go on a walk one day because the kids were being grumpy. We took them to the local church because there isn't any local playground and they climbed on a big metal railing that is on the side of the sidewalk and played on that like it was monkey bars. After that got boring we climbed up the trees and played in the leaves and we threw windfall apples at the dog.

Rocket is not traditionally the type of dog that likes to chase balls, however, he was having a lot of fun chasing the apples so maybe the problem is that the normal balls that we throw are too big? We have thrown him some windfall apples at other times since then and he usually will chase them.

We also went and picked locust beans and we pulled the individual seeds out of them and made a big pile of seeds for whatever reason. It was fun even if we were not getting anything accomplished. Since then we started going to the church for the kids to play on warm days a few other times that week

By the end of the week it was time to get ready to go to Grandma Julie's beach house for vacation. We packed everything up and drove all day Saturday. The traffic was pretty good and we made decent time and made it to California by the time that the kids were supposed to go to bed. We ate some soup that they had warmed up for us and then went straight to bed. 

The next week we were in California the whole week. The Poulson family loves to spend a lot of time on the beach and so that's what we usually do, however, this time the weather was rather cold so even though we went out to the beach most of the days it was certainly a different situation than we usually have. The kids went into the water some but didn't swim way too much. Some of the kids were brave and put on wetsuits and went boogie boarding.

The kids also got seashells and made sand castles. They discovered a living sand dollar - which is pretty unusual - and they made a place to store it in when the tide was really low. One of the cousins found a incredibly cool whelk shell which had blue brown and white colors and was rather large.

Mike also decided to turn the many palm tree leaves that were scattering all over the beach into crude baskets. He wove them together and made baskets that could hold probably about four cups of material. He taught some of the kids how to do it and Alison also made one and then after that he made a few larger baskets as well. It was pretty interesting.

The adults played games and talked and generally had a fun time, so it wasn't any different than normal for us.