"She-shells" at the "She-shore"

We were holding our breath and crossing our fingers that our plans to go to Disneyland on Monday would still happen and that the weather wouldn't be as bad as was predicted. This was not to be the case. Saturday night the fog rolled, and so did the snow. The house in the hills and mountains outside of San Diego that we were staying in seriously got snow! Enough that we were snowed in on Sunday and most of Monday too. We were supposed to go home on Tuesday, and when we called Trevor's boss to say we were SNOWED in, in CALIFORNIA I'm not sure he really believed us....

Once Monday rolled around we were feeling a little cabin fever. We wanted to get out. The snow had finally stopped and with some shoveling we were able to get out. We decided to go to the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. They had a whole display featuring artifacts from the Titanic. I remember first learning about the Titanic in 4th grade and having a fascination about it, so I couldn't wait to see things from the actual boat!

(on a side note, as we drove under a bridge that led into balboa park a cop slowed us down and we thought there was an accident ahead, but it was a dead body! We are pretty sure it was a homeless guy that had jumped off the bridge. We realized that this was a common occurence because there were suicide hotline signs on every bridge we went on)After nearly being charged an arm and a leg, we were admitted into the crowded museum and got to see not only the titanic artifacts but dinosaur bones and other interesting things. When we came out the wet and chilly day had turned warm and sunny! We decided to make an unplanned trip to the beach.

Brody had been talking about finding "she-shells" at the beach for days. In truth, a few weeks ago he was playing in the dirt at our house and looking through the rocks trying to find sea shells and was pretty disappointed when we told him that there weren't any at our house far from the ocean.

We thought we'd just walk along the shore. Then we thought we'd just let our toes get wet. Then we ended up splashing, falling, and playing in the water. We had no towels. No swimsuits. It still wasn't all that warm, but we didn't even care. It was so much fun. Brody loved every minute of it. Ryder liked it until he fell in. Twice. After that whenever the tide rolled up onto the sand, he ran away. He loved running in the sand and chasing the birds best.

The beach we went to was on Coronado Island and because there is a naval base right there, there were so many naval planes that flew over us and the boys thought that was pretty awesome too.

We left that day and brought some of the beach with us. Going on this unplanned visit was fun, but messy. Ry was especially unhappy at being so cold, dirty, and wet. We really didn't have any choice but to dump a few bottles of cold water on the kids to get as much sand off as we could, and strip them down to just underwear and a diaper. Then we piled the jackets and blanket we had in the car on top of them as we made our 45 minute cold trek back home.

This wasn't our only visit to the beach on our trip. Because we stayed a few extra days, we were able to go back to the Coronado beach again and also mission beach. Seagulls flew away with one of Ryder's croc shoes and poked holes and drank the capri suns we had brought one day, but we were able to gather some she-shells, play, and make memories. It was such a fun time and Brody proudly shows off his shells and talks about it all the time to anyone who will listen.