Off with a Bang

The day before I left Utah was quite adventurous, Ellia and I went to Cole's birthday celebration at Jungle Gym's where she tried some of the rides. We started with the carousel and she seemed to be doing ok, despite the frightened look on her face, and then all of a sudden she let out a life preserving scream and got the frightened look again (I think she had been holding her breath). The next ride we went on just went around, not up and down, so although she was a bit scared at first, I think at the end she started to enjoy it.

We left that party early to make it to grandma Laura and grandpa Jeff's house to visit with all those cousins and relatives, we even got to spend some time with friends we hadn't seen in awhile.

The next day when Jeremy picked me up from the airport, we decided to stick around and do some things in the L.A. area. As we were heading to our first destination we drove right through Hollywood Blvd much to our surprise, so we decided to stop and walk up and down the street,

We tried to convince Spongebob that his pineapple was in our front yard and he should come back to home with us, but he just gave us that goofy smile and didn't say anything.

Sometimes my students at IHS would tell me they were going to move to California and go to Hollywood High, I doubted its existence until I saw this.I didn't know Superman jumped in the picture with me until I turned around after Jer had snapped it and Superman sneakily dashed away. and I thought Donald Duck was just a cartoon character!

our first planned stop - the La Brea Tar Pits,

these are fossilized skulls from dire wolves that were found in tar pits, there were over 400 of them

This mammoth was motorized and made noise, it kind of scared ElliaAn actual tar pit...the mammoth in the tar was sortof floating around, we weren't sure if it was on purpose or not, weird

finally we spent the evening on the beach and the pier, watching people do some pretty interesting things like tight rope walking, gymnastics and hula hoop routines.

This movie is for Jared Collings and Emily, since we all tried to hula hoop at Lori's party and realized it wasn' t as easy as we remembered it being as kids, this lady had quite the routine, and this was only part of it.

In other news, Ellia still loves water and sprinklers and she is learning to open cupboards and drawers faster than I can follow her around with the drill and safety latches. She especially likes taking things out of and off of anything that has things in it or on it! ( I however keep forgetting the latches are on, and have broken every centimeter of fingernail I ever had!)