dalia and eloise: What a trip!

This is going to be a long post. We had an amazing adventure to California with our little lady - who is going to be 1 next week! We started our trip in the Redwoods, which is where Mark and I met. I haven't been there for years and we wanted Dalia to experience the BIG trees as early in life as possible. And since her new favorite sign is tree, it seemed quite fitting. After the Redwoods, we headed to the Sierras for a week at the Berkeley family camp Mark grew up going to. You have no idea how fun and funny it was to take Dalia to the forest for two weeks. She learned how to look up and go "ooohhhhh" with wide eyes and breathy smiles and the first morning we woke up under the trees she blearily sat up, looked around and started frantically signing tree (her version is her arm swinging back and forth).

In the Redwoods, we saw the ocean:

and we stayed with our dear friend Scott's folks, Linda and Bill. What a treat to see Linda with Dalia. She taught us that all babies like having their face smothered by a hand.

we visited the tallest trees in the world (yes, I hugged them and Dalia did too).

we met a toad, a rooster and some chickens, and a horse! and got to visit with the rest of Scott's family.

for our one day stop over in the bay (where we were, as usual, graciously hosted by our kick-ass brother and sister in-law Jim and Ali - Jim being the master of ceremonies at camp), we visited aunt dee dee and our friends Scott and Dana (where Dalia got to eat goldfish crackers for the first time - yum!)

and camp was just cool. Dalia met so many friends and family including her cousin Ashlyn. She got to play on Party Fun Island in the swimming hole (we unfortunately have no photos of this yet as we were joining her on the giant flotation device we so love - thanks auntie and lito). She generally had fun getting totally filthy in the dirt, sand and in the dining hall. Note to self - teach baby to walk before taking her somewhere where all there is is dirt to crawl around on. We prepared for this messy part of our trip by letting her play in the dirt and rocks at home before we left. It truly helped. We didn't anticipate how much sand she would enjoy eating on kiddy beach while playing with her kick ass green bucket and shovel. It was exceptionally fun to hang out with my bro and sis and cousin Anders and watching him turn into the tie-died t-shirt wearing, blues band loving kid he always wanted to be. There are so many people we want to mention as part of the joy of our trip - her grammy Karen, the Barbs, auntie Ali for spending so much time with Dalia, Andrea (one of Dalia's new "aunties"), everyone in the Buchanan/Fonseca clan and the Nakaharas; the BTC girls - Suzanna, Christine, Anya and her little one, Eyana; Rishi (his fuzzy face) and Amy; and our Seattle fam, especially dear aunt Robin who broke her ankle and had to endure backwoods medical care for the sake of Connor having a total blast at camp for the first time.