Olympia Washington Childrens Museum

Although Washington State is a great place to be with nature and enjoy just about every outdoor activity, you have to always be prepared for rainy days. We luckily found an awesome children's museum where we can play when the weather is too cold and rainy to play outdoors. The cool thing I discovered is that all children's museums in the U.S. are linked. And since we have a membership to the Escondido Children's Museum, we were able to upgrade our membership to the national membership for a small fee. Yippee !!!

The girls loved playing with the lentils. Something I would never attempt recreating in my own house. There were lentils everywhere.


Here's Maya watering a garden of vegetables.

Here's Dr. Maya Khoury caring for a baby.

Here's our little dentist cleaning a hippo's teeth.

Here's Sahara driving the delivery truck.

Check out the great assortment of vegetables and fruit. The girls would collect basket after basket and take them to the kitchen and pretend to cook.

They had a great assortment of breads, meats and fish and dry goods.

Here's the fully loaded kitchen.

Even with all the pictures, you have seen only a small portion of this wonderful place. Needless to say we are thrilled we found this place.

Greetings From Washington State

We are visiting Papa Epi for a few weeks in Washington State. Although Spring is late this year we have luckily had nice weather. Thank goodness !!! Maya and Sahara have been having a great time tearing down Grandpa Epi's house. As much as possible I try to get the girls out of the house so they can enjoy nature and get their energy out. We visited Defiance Point in Tacoma, WA. This place is only 1/2 hour away and is a lush park which has a cool zoo and aquarium. Here's a few pictures from our visit there.

Maya and Sahara chasing geese in the park.

Sahara sneaking up on some unsuspecting ducks that are napping.

Maya met a friendly squirrel who is probably used to being fed. Can you see the squirrel to the left of Maya.

Here's the zoo/aquarium.

They had a petting zoo for the kids. Here you can brush the goats. Maya and Sahara enjoyed this for about a minute before they were running to the next thing.

We were the only ones in the petting zoo for a while which was pretty cool.

The kids area included the petting zoo, a play set, wallabies, snakes, a ray, lizards and these cool slides. Here's Papa Epi watching Maya slide down.

The aquarium had a cool shark exhibit. The girls have gotten good at making the animal sound for each animal. And when we ask them what a shark says, they say, "da da, da da." Nader taught them to say the sound effect from the movie JAWS. Nice daddy !!!

Strawberries, Friends and Fun

We had a fun filled day today. In the morning we met our friends Levi, Aaron and their mom, Cynthia at the U PICK strawberry fields in Carlsbad. The weather was perfect for strawberry picking. Not too cold and not too hot. Here are quite a few pictures from our day.

Cynthia, Levi and Aaron right before we attacked the strawberry fields. You buy a bucket or buckets, and proceed to pick until you and your buckets are full.

Here's a visual of a row of strawberries. You walk down a row and pick. We were told that it was better to pick from the bottom of the stem so the strawberry grows back and to pick the smaller ones because they are sweeter.

Here's Maya and Sahara hard at work.

Take a look at their buckets.

I think Maya is eating more than picking.

Here's our friend Aaron snacking in an ocean of strawberries.

After nap we met a few other friends to go to the new children's museum in downtown San Diego. To my disappointment it was closed today so we went to Balboa Park instead. Here's a picture of Klara, Khloe, Kimi and their mommy Alyssa.

We went to the science museum which has an area called Kid City for infants to 6 year old.

This place was perfect to spend the afternoon. It was indoors which was good because it was cold out and it was filled with age appropriate activities that were all science inspired.

Here's Maya enjoying time on the computer without her daddy chasing her off.

Here's a vacuum exhibit where you put balls in the tube and it spits out another tube. Maya really loved this one.

Here's Sahara making faces in the funky mirror.


These conveyors and the fake food was a huge hit with the kids.


And here's a close up of little Khloe. Cute as a button.

Mammoth

Last week we went to Mammoth to enjoy what snow they had before it was gone. So we packed our bags took off for the mountains with Tata (Grandma) and Sido (Grandpa) in tow.

Here's Maya rolling around with her suitcase.

Here's the Mammoth at the ski/snowboard resort.

We stayed at The Village which is in a great location and after we moved rooms, we had this great view of the snow peaked mountains.

Here's Maya walking around while daddy is getting his Starbucks just outside our hotel.

You can't really tell but I took this picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting in a snowcat waiting to go up the mountain. I took this picture while standing in the lift line.


Here's me and my hubby after a day of snowboarding. As you can see there is still snow on the mountains and because there were hardly anyone there, we got to enjoy it to ourselves and never waiting in lift lines. Perfect !

While we were snowboarding Tata and Sido were watching the monkey twins . We came in the door to this scene. They were naked and swinging from the chandelier.



On the recommendation from the girl who was working at our favorite bakery in town, we went to a nearby playground. The sun was out so it was warm while the girls played with a beautiful backdrop of the mountains.

Near the park was a natural stream.

It was very nice exploring and walking along side it.


Here's another picture of daddy with his Starbucks. We found some bears while walking through the Village and we could not resist the photo opportunity.

Sahara found some snow to play in.

We took a drive on the Old Mammoth Lakes road and found ourselves driving through beautiful wooded snowfields. So we had to stop and let the girls play in the untouched snow. There was no one around for miles. Very peaceful and beautiful.


On another recommendation from the girl at the bakery, we visited Mono Lake.


Mono Lake is only around 30 minutes north of Mammoth Lake. We didn't know what to expect and what we discovered with so beautiful. We were the only people there and it felt surreal. Those rock formations are called Tufas and they are mineral deposits from natural gas leaks from the ground. These formations were once totally under water. The water in this lake is 25 times the salinity of the ocean.

Here's Sido and the girls.

Here are the grandparents, Linda and Paul.

Here's daddy and Maya.

The pictures never capture the feeling or the experience, but it was majestic to see this place.

More photos of Tufas.


Here we are walking back to the car.

All in all we have a very good trip. Everything went smoothly other than the fact that the girls had a cold. Here's a picture of Maya asleep on the ride home.