eugene and esther kindly agreed to babysit the munchkins so that phil and i could go out on a date last saturday night.  it was a belated anniversary celebration, just the two of us.  so while e & e kept the kids happily entertained with play doh, books, and plenty of snacks, we slipped out for dinner. i asked phil where we were going once we were in the car and his only answer was, “the restaurant.”  even when pressed to tell me which restaurant, the answer was still the same.  we ended up here:   on a side note, phil and i celebrated our one-year dating anniversary at ports-o-call…

so phil joined us in our new home thursday evening (hard to believe that this all happened three weeks ago already!) and esther and eugene invited us to visit the cabrillo marine aquarium the next day.  we got to go before the aquarium opened and esther gave us a private tour.  it was so cool!  and so cool to see how much esther loves her job working with the marine animals and teaching kids all about them.  she did such a great job with mikey that he felt brave enough to touch some of the animals. i don’t remember the name of this spiky little fellow…   but mikey held him all by himself!   pretty sea…

i found the cable and can finally post some pictures!  not to mention that we’re now down to about ten boxes left to unpack.  not bad considering we started with somewhere around a hundred boxes. so i’m going to back up a little bit and post pics from our last few days in minnesota.  after that will be a few pics from phil’s road trip. our dear friends, the shafers, rescued us from our packing woes and took us out to dinner at stella’s fish cafe.  they even arranged to have drew’s very kind parents babysit all the kids so that we could have a real night out!  the food was…

happy anniversary to my phil!  phil had the day off so we were able to spend it all together with the kids.  mostly low-key– went to the long beach aquarium but didn’t stay very long because it was sooo crowded which made it not fun trying to get around.  we did get the year-long family membership and so will be able to go again during the week when it’s much quieter.  afterward, we walked along the boardwalk and enjoyed being outside away from the crowds.  had lunch at “tugboat pete’s” then headed home so the kids could nap.  allie and phil napped, mikey played in his room (that boy!), and i watched a little…

we’re here!  we’re here!  my apologies for dropping out of contact since we left– it’s been CRAZY.  it took a few days after we arrived to get the internet set up and then wouldn’t you know it, our computer crashed the very next day.  so we had to wait til the movers came (last friday) with our other computer to finally get back online again. thankfully, my brother was here when the computer crashed and took it with him to save the files on it to an external hard drive.  lesson learned the hard way– back up files BEFORE a computer crash.  so hopefully he’ll be able to save all…