Well, better late than never, right? I started this post a week ago but due to some technical difficulties with our computer, I'm just now getting it posted...
Warning: The following post contains lots of "vacation pictures and stories" which may not be interesting to the casual reader, but due to the fact that this blog takes the place of a family journal, tell them I will!
Joe and I got to go to San Francisco for 6 days (3 of those, he was at a training for work) and we had a great time! The picture above was taken at the San Francisco
Museum of Fine Arts...such a beautiful place! By the time we got into our hotel and made our way to Downtown (our hotel was
soooo far away, we didn't plan that very well...) and had dinner, everything else was closed. So, we just wandered around and got an idea of where things were so we could come up with a plan of attack for the next day. Below, was taken the first night that we were there on the public fishing pier. I was a little shocked by how many homeless people were camped out there for the night, I guess I'm a little sheltered.
This picture was the next day when we were seeing how the area looked in the daylight, a much less scary experience! Behind us is Alcatraz, which we toured later that day.
This was during our tour of Alcatraz, I was in the solitary confinement part of the jail. I was spooked just being in there long enough to take the picture!
Here we are on the ferry, just after leaving Alcatraz. That was a cool place to tour, a little creepy but very
interesting. I'd never known about the "Indian Land" period of the island's history, anybody else?
This was taken after Joe and I had just devoured a delicious crepe filled with chocolate and strawberries, it was so good! We ate so much good food on this trip, my waistline will be recovering from it for weeks. (Sigh) Isn't he cute!
After touring Alcatraz we rented bikes and rode to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a fun ride, beautiful trails that followed the bay with a killer hill leading up to the actual bridge. It was well worth it, though.
Maybe I have a sick sense of humor, but I thought this was pretty funny! (In case you can't see, it's a phone that's hardwired to a crisis counseling line...in the middle of the bridge!)
Here we are, lounging on the Caltrain. That's how we got from our hotel in South San Fran (which, btw, is actually a separate city, yah, we learned that the hard way) to all of the tourist attractions in downtown. We took several trips on these trains, luckily it was only about a 20 minute ride. Sam would have loved it!
Here are some more eating pictures, seriously, we did a lot of that! This was at the
Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory, we got these amazing sundaes.
Okay, and the final food pictures were taken in
Japantown where Joe choose to eat on our last night. As a general rule, I hate Japanese food, but I agreed to for his sake. Turns out, I enjoyed mine (
teriyaki chicken with veggie tempura) a whole lot more that he enjoyed his (some weird, gross looking
Japanese stew). But the most amusing thing about the dinner was that I ate the whole thing with chopsticks (a first for me) it was a huge accomplishment. Below, are some kind of silly and embarrassing video clips of my attempts, lets just say that dinner took a LONG time!
The attempt....
...and success!!!
And, finally, me and the boys with the
souvenirs that we brought them. I missed them so much, it was great to come home to the little
rugrats!
Andrew was fearless with the animals. We were in the goat cage and just walked right up to the goat with no coaching and was petting it, I was shocked!
Then, on the other hand, there is Sam who was not so excited about the goats. Here he is explaining that to Jessi. He said, " I just don't like them, that's all! I don't have to like them, it's okay." And it's true!
He did humor us, though, so that we could just get a picture. 
(A quick side note, this smaller picture was taken at the same farm two years ago when Sam was almost the exact same age as Andrew, I thought that it was kind of fun to compare the pictures!)
That takes us to the pea pit, a favorite of all the little kids. Basically, it's a huge sandbox but instead of sand it is filled with dried peas. Fun idea, and much easier to clean up than sand!
Sam and Jessi. He absolutely adores her, she was instantly one of his favorite people in the world...just goes to show that she is meant to be in the family! We love you Jessi!
Andrew wanted to climb into the corral with the ponies, but luckily Joe was standing guard. 
He settled for being allowed to pet the pony, instead. 
This was by far the biggest smile we saw out of Sam! He was begging the whole afternoon to ride the tractor ride (it was a little tractor pulling a line of these little cars) and so we let him do that right before we left. I was actually kind of surprised that he actually did it, I was sure that he would freak out when it actually came down to it, but he didn't! He loved it and talked about it the rest of the day.
