California - Day 4

On Saturday night, Peter went to LA with his friend Collin to spend a little time with his family and get some much needed friend time. He even got a tour of Disney on Monday, and that is where we had to pick him up.

Disney HQ

Since we were there anyway we decided to make a day of it with a trip to the La Brea Tar pits. Nate didn't like it as much as we'd hoped, I guess because the bones weren't actually "dinosaurs" just other very old things. I found it pretty ineresting though. Maybe next time we should go to the Museum of Natural History that is right next door.

Before heading inside we picked up some Baja Fresh and chowed
down on the picnic tables. What a great view of the pits!

She wants to get out!

Pretty little "park"

Looking down on the atrium

Pretty much all Peter did was chase Miss Mia around

Yay Prehistoric animals!

After hitting up the Tar Pits we went to BabyCakes NYC for some vegan treats! I think Peter saying "I couldn't even tell it was vegan!" goes a long way to tell you how good they were. He got a cookie sandwich and Nate and I split some red velvet and lemon cupcakes!

YUM!

California - Days 2 & 3

One good way to get your kids on the schedule of wherever you are going (or back on your schedule when you come back) is to make them so tired that they are ready to go to sleep (or willing to sleep late) whenever you will let them! We didn’t get to Bakersfield until almost 2am, so we were all happy to hit the sack as soon as we got to my mom’s house. My mom and Jerry offered to let Mia sleep in their room for the whole week so they could take care of her when she woke up and we would get to have a little bit of a lie in. I can’t remember if it was any later than normal on Saturday, but every single other day, like clockwork, she woke up at 7:15am. She makes a pretty good alarm clock – if that’s when you want to wake up! I’m just happy she wasn’t ready to get up at 4:15 that morning.

Saturday we had a Reid family get together. My three uncles and their families, my step-sisters and their families and some close friends of Peter converged on my mom’s house from all over CA. I’m so happy we got to see them because we haven’t since the last time we were in California and some of them even longer than that. Luckily, they didn’t show up until later in the afternoon so I was able to take a pain pill in the morning and let it wear off a little bit before they arrived. (I haven’t had to take another pill since then. I’ve been chugging A LOT of water and keeping my fingers crossed that all of the stones have gone away.)  And all of us (well, not Nate) were able to get naps.

 I don’t really know how to impart how awesome these people are. I miss them all the time!

Family!

He always loves playing with Aunt Jen's Talking Dog!

Uncle Ted and Deb

After all this excitement we were very happy to have a relatively low-key day on Sunday – church, Mexican food and playing in the backyard.

Pooped

The rest of the crew

Katie and Katarina

Cousin Kat, Nate, Mia and Grandpa Jerry

California - Day one!

We're going to start this story back in January when I ended up in the ER. I started feeling some pain during church, went to urgent care and was diagnosed with a kidney infection. I got some pain medication but couldn't keep it down and the pain just kept getting worse and worse, so I went to the ER. They couldn't find a stone on the ultrasound so they kept the diagnosis of kidney infection. On top of whatever meds they had given me at the hospital (awesome) they gave me an Rx for some nausea medicine to help me keep the pain meds down. Well, that seemed to work. I took the pain meds for another day and was fine after that.

Jump to March with what I thought was a UTI leading to a CT which showed multiple kidney stones! Other than the UTI I hadn't had any problems since January. I got the results on the day before we were supposed to leave for California and, I'm not kidding, about 5 minutes later I started feeling something like I had in January. Luckily that subsided and I was OK for the night. But the next day, about 5 minutes after I got to work I had to leave because the pain was so bad. From what I hear, I looked like I hurt too.

All I could think about was how in 10 hours I was supposed to be getting on a 6 hour flight! What was I going to do if I was still in this amount of pain as we were flying over Kansas? I took my pain and nausea meds, dozed a bit (they make me sleepy!) and finalized the packing when I could. At some point I got news that our flight was delayed by 3 hours. Three hours. So, now, on top of flying while passing a (some?) kidney stone(s), I was going to have to figure out how to entertain two kids for three hours in the airport and hope they crashed as soon as they got on the plane. Sounds fun right? No. I was freaking out. I was starting to think that we were not meant to get on the plane. (Was it going to crash?) Luckily, a few minutes later I got another message that the delay had been changed to 30 minutes. (Did someone accidentally type an extra 0 in the delay box?) THANK GOD! That I could handle. And actually it worked out great because it gave us time to get a sit down meal instead of grabbing something to try to eat on the plane while 15 month old hands tried to grab it at the same time.

On the way to the airport I took another pill and happily floated through security and all the way to the plane. The flight went very smoothly. After getting Mia to go to sleep by letting her listen to her night-night CD (Baby Mozart) on Nate's iPod, then getting him to fall asleep listening to his night-night CD (Now That's What I Call Disney), Peter and I actually got to watch an entire movie (National Treasure - it was the only thing I could think of at the last minute while heavily medicated that I knew we'd agree on)! Mia woke up again just as we were about to start our descent. My mom and Jerry were there to pick us up and, other than a short scare that our luggage was lost, we quickly made our way to the car.

Welcome to California!