In October, Rex and I got to travel with my parents and sister Meilin to San Diego to hang out with our grandparents and some cousins on the Smith side. Andrew wasn't able to get off work cuz I sort of decided last minute to go but Rex and I had fun! I was so pleased with how well Rex did in the car. I think I over prepared for it and he did A LOT better than I could have ever hoped. He rarely fussed and we just put movies on a portable TV for him, gave him plenty of snacks and got out to walk around for a bit when we needed to eat or change his diaper. We got to stay at an awesome beach house and had lots of fun. Rex wasn't to thrilled with the ocean or the wet sand, but he had fun playing in the dry sand and picking up sea shells and putting them in buckets. I don't have pictures of him playing on the beach cuz my mom has them on her camera so if I get them I will try to post them.
This is the view of the beach from the deck of the house. We were right on the beach it was awesome!!! The pier was just a short distance away and had a cute little fish and chips restaurant at the end. My dad and I went there to eat one day and got to try swordfish, with halibut and salmon! yum!
This was taken from the pier. The house we stayed in is the cute pink one. It was called the Pink Dolphin.
Another view from the pier. That hill in the distance is Mexico. We were only 2 miles away from the border! Crazy!
Rex had fun chasing the pigeons with grandpa. He was laughing so hard!
Pointing at the pigeons
(The pigeon is under the bench)
The beach was amazing. It had so many sea shells and they were huge too! My little cousins had lots of fun combing the beach for shells. We found all sorts of cool shells from sand dollars to the cool spiral shells to super large clams. This is the big clam shell that my cousin Emerson found. I found a spiral shell about as large as Rex's head! I have never been on a beach with so many shells! usually the shells are tiny but there were so many good sized shells!
Can't visit the beach without taking a picture like this!
Rex and I at sunset
While we were there we also visited the Mormon Battalion visitor's
center in Old Town San Diego. It was pretty cool and they had an awesome
program I highly recommend it. Afterward the program, they had computers that you could look up and see pictures of the men who were in the battalion. On of our Great great(not sure how many greats) grandpas on our smith side was in it so we got to see his picture. It was pretty cool. they also had a little thing where the kids could learn how to pan for gold. This is Meilin with her gold she found.
On the car ride home-I had my jacket hanging in the window to block the sun and Rex was playing with the strings hehehe
Being a goof
So we didn't take Rex Trick-or-Treating..We thought he was too young and
we didn't really want any candy lying around our house. My Grandma
Smith did a Mystery dinner though so we dressed up for that. Andrew was a
secret agent, I was a Nurse and Rex was a Rexasaurus! (that is actually one of our nick names for him so we thought the costume was perfect!) The costume he is
wearing is actually my very first Halloween costume when I was a baby
that my mom made for me! On the actual day of Halloween, Andrew and I totally forgot it was Halloween and so we didn't have any candy! Our Doorbell rang and we just pretended not to hear. We ended up going to visit his parents and show off Rex in his costume and then came home for the rest of the night and pretended not to be home...but by that time most trick-or-treaters were done!
Our first snow storm we tried taking Rex in the snow but he didn't enjoy it. He thought it was funny to watch our dog Sasha play in the snow but he wanted nothing to do with it....oh well we will keep trying. The snow was in early November and our trees hadn't lost their leaves yet and one of our trees had a bunch of branches break off. As you can see it is right next to the powerlines so thankfully it didn't take those down with it!
Rex loves cars!
Rex is a bit obsessed with cars. It also seems that he inherited his father's OCD for organization...he likes to neatly line up his cars in little rows all over the house. He will line them up on the piano bench, window sill, couch, hallway, our bed, his room...EVERYWHERE! it is cute :) He also is obsessed with the movie Cars and asks for it at least once a day and gets quite upset when we turn it off. We have tried other movies with him (cuz we're a bit sick of cars) but he just doesn't care for them and they don't hold his attention. I actually don't mind since I can let him watch the movie and I can get stuff cleaned and he won't move an inch hehehe.
For Christmas, we just bought him clothes since I was getting to the end of stuff I got from showers and he desperately needed some. We did however get him lots of...you guessed it...CARS! Andrew had about 30 of the little Chevron cars from when he was younger that he had kept so we wrapped them all up and gave them to him. He loves them!
For New Year's Eve, we had some of Andrew's friends and their wives come over. One of the, (Travis and Heather) have a little boy (Falan) who is 7 months older than Rex and is also very obsessed with cars. They had fun lining up the cars together and then we put of the Cars movie for them and they were both thoroughly engrossed with it!
L-R: Breezy, Travis, and Heather
Andrew and Eli (sorry no pic of me!)
So I think that about wraps up the rest of our year! If you lasted until the end, thanks! If not, it's ok...I really just wanted to get the memories down :)
