October in Review

October has come and gone in a blur! Since it's already November I'm going to do a monthly review post.

Sep 28 - Oct 4th: I have H1N1. This week is a blur.
Oct 5th: Maddux and Kevin come down with H1N1.
Oct 8th: Ava comes down with H1N1

Oct 10th: Kevin leaves for San Francisco for the big Oracle conference.
Oct 11th: kids are healthy and fever-free! woohoo!
Oct 12th: My mom calls. Turns out in my H1N1 haze I booked her flight down here wrong... 2 weeks wrong to be exact. The intention was for her to fly in on the 13th, but I somehow booked her ticket for the 27th. Thank goodness for the super nice airline guy who gave her a 100% refund. At least she realized the error before showing up at the airport!

Oct 13th: I start feeling tired again and am coughing more and more.
Oct 14th: I go the doctor, turns out I have bronchitis. fun stuff. Get my mom from the airport.

Oct 15th: I fly to San Francisco! I was so scared of getting pulled aside for my cough. And once on the plane I was afraid of annoying all the people around me. I lucked out though in that I had the only empty seat on the plane right next to me! And the guy in the window seat slept the entire 5 1/2 hours so it was pretty nice and peaceful, well, as nice as a 5 1/2 hour flight can be anyway.

I took the train into downtown SF to meet Kevin. His conferences were ending about the time I was arriving so it worked out perfect. We had a little boutique hotel that night (where he had been all week) and much to my surprise it was right over Lush! If you haven't used any Lush bath products you just do not know what you are missing! The entire hotel smelled like Lush and it was divine. So, of course I did some shopping there. :) We walked around this downtown shopping are some and found a place to eat before heading back for a quick nap. We had tickets to see Wicked that night, but the long day was catching up with me. All in all I ended up being awake for 20 hours straight, whew.

Wicked was amazing! Wicked premiered in SF back in 2003. It's now at an absolutely gorgeous old theater. What an amazing show. I was thoroughly entranced the entire time.


16-18th: We moved to the more touristy Fisherman's Wharf area of SF. We saw the famous Pier 39 Sea Lions. There were so many of them, I could have watched them for hours, though they do stink like crazy!

We also did a little geocaching so we could get California on our map. We did one that took us on a really long walk. I think in the end it was an almost 6 mile trek there and back. Good thing the weather was nice! Here's the view of the Golden Gate from the little jetty we ended up on.

Saturday we had scheduled a wine tour. The day started by taking us to the Muir Woods which are famous for the giant Coastal Redwoods. It was quite cold, but very peaceful and awe inspiring to be amongst such huge trees. I took a lot of pictures but this one with a crowd in front gives the best sense of scale. It shows only the bottom 1/3 of the entire tree.


After that we headed for wine country... Sonoma! We hit 2 wineries before lunch. And the first little winery we went to gave us "tastes" that were a good half glass each. Our entire group was pretty toasted by the time we got to downtown Sonoma for lunch. :) The mini-bus went from being really quiet in the morning to a very loud and chatty place! The wineries we visited were, Jacuzzi (the same family that actually invented jacuzzi tubs!), Homewood, Loxton, Valley of the Moon, and Gloria Ferer (known for their sparkling wine, yum). This picture was taken on the patio of Gloria Ferer overlooking their vineyards.


Sunday was our last day. We had to check out of our hotel that morning even though our flight wasn't until 10:30 that night. We had a tour of Alcatraz scheduled. It turned out to be a very dreary and cold day. Alcatraz is a really dreary place all on it's own. I can't imagine living there... and was quite surprised to learn that many of the prison guards lived there with their families! A cold, windy, filled-with-bad-guys rock in the middle of the bay is not what I'd call a family-friendly place at all.



And that was the end for SF! We took what will likely be our last red-eye flight to get home. They are just so miserable. We didn't sleep a wink, and arrived back in Charlotte at 6:30 in the morning, so we essentially lost an entire night's sleep. It took us a good 2 days to recover. It was a great trip though and I'm really glad I decided to tag along. Kevin's conferences are turning about to be great, and cheap, ways for us to travel!

Oct 26th: Ava had a school project where she had to pick an animal and learn different facts about it. She chose to do her project as a mobile and her animal was a flamingo. She came up with questions that we then found the answers for and we also got to include a picture of a baby flamingo that we saw at Riverbanks this summer. She came up with pretty much the entire layout of her mobile. I think it came out quite cute!

I also had Ava's 1st quarter teacher conference. She is doing great in school, just as we expected. I am thrilled to report that Ava is now reading at a 3.8 level (that translates to what the average 3rd grader is reading in the 8th month). That pushed her reading level range up to 4.5! I don't think it will ever cease to amaze me at how well she reads.

Halloween: it was a rainy halloween, but it held out just long enough for the kids to get 2 buckets full of candy. Maddux was Darth Vader and Ava was a black cat.



So, that about sums up October. It's nice to finally be well again!