Seaside Beach Trip

We headed to the beach a couple of weeks ago before school started and had a truly wonderful day. We went to Seaside, a small town on the Oregon coast that is all set up for tourists. Fortunately we went on an "off" day in the middle of the week that had a rainy forecast. Indeed it was raining when we left home, but by the time we got to Seaside just under an hour later we were enjoying gorgeous blue sky, sunshine and mild temperatures. It seems like that never happens -- woohoo! You know the reason it did happen is because Jake had thoroughly prepared the day before looking up all kinds of activities we could do indoors due to the gloomy forecast. What we ended up with was a delightful blend of the outdoors and what Seaside had to offer indoors, which is lots! We all agreed that it ended up being pretty much a perfect day.



After playing at the beach we headed for the Aquarium. It was small but really good. They had a place where you could feed seals (the seals would clap for you to throw them fish :) and an octopus in a really cool enclosure that I didn't get pictures of.

But here are a few things I did get pictures of:


A 9 ft. squid!

A nice lady offered to take a picture of all of us but the battery ran out right then. Arrgh! I didn't make her wait around for me to switch the battery, so here's the family sans me:


They had a tilt-a-whirl that Jake really wanted to try and Daniel was brave enough to go with him. They loved it! Daniel was smiling and laughing the whole time. If I'd been on it I would have been vomiting the whole time:

Joshua opted to play miniature golf instead of taking a ride on the tilt-a-whirl. A wise choice, if you ask me. He really enjoyed the golf and had nice form!

There was a nice indoor mall we checked out. It had a place where you can get those olde tyme pictures taken that we definitely want to come back and do sometime. Daniel and Lucas settled for a ride on the carousel in the meantime:

I love this shot!

Joshua, Daniel, Lucas and ?

It will be so exciting to swap that question mark with the name of our fourth baby in March! I've already announced it on facebook but decided that this baby definitely deserves better than that -- as in a post on his or her very own family blog telling everyone how excited we are for his/her arrival. And we are pretty excited! Especially now that I am finally starting to feel better -- huzzah!

So stay tuned! We'll find out this baby's gender sometime next month...and as I'm sure you can imagine, the stakes are definitely raised when you have three in a row of the same gender ;)