"Hail the conquering hero"

10 points to whoever can name that movie quote :)  Last night at about 10 we had a HUGE storm.  Lots of hail, wind, and scary stuff.  I drove around today and found that we were on the edge of a tornado... so we were lucky.  And, don't worry, our weeds survived too...

But our toys didn't...
Nor did our tomatoes, zucchini, squash, peppers, watermelon, cucumbers, beans, and pumpkins...
Our porch didn't fare too well either...
This is the hail, it was about quarter size, but the wind made it sound so much worse!
The kids didn't even wake up, and thank goodness we weren't in a tornado or else DAve and I would have still been standing upstairs in the hall waiting for the kids to cry.  Next time we'll probably wake them up and bring them downstairs.  Now I'm convinced that tornado sirens come way too late.

track & field

My sister Nichole is in town with her family.  I might get pictures of all of them, but I at least got a picture of Simone (the birthday girl) at her party.

Al and Elijah sporting the hats, here's is happy Simone... not too sure about the hat
I also signed up Alex for track this summer.  It has been sooooo funny to watch him.  He did get Dave's competitive edge, which is not an edge at all... more like a flat field.  It would be hard to find a competitive bone in his body.  We didn't go to a meet yet because we lost all the maps, but we finally got to one last saturday.
HEre's Al competing in the 6 x 50m relay :)  He ran hard, I think he felt the thrill of it finally.  An below he is prepping for his standing long jump.  His track shirt has the words "winner winner" and then a picture of a "chicken dinner" underneath.  He's totally awesome :)
 I'll post more pictures of nikki and nate soon.  They decided to visit before they move to Hawaii, so I want to get some current pictures of them.

California

We went to San Clemente this week for a family reunion on my dad's side.  We got a beach house with my mom and dad, here's the back, all festively lit with tiki torches

It was a literally a 5 minute walk to the beach, where we spent most of our time.  Buried in the sand, catching sand crabs, boogie boarding, trying to surf, and getting totally burned.

This is the backyard of the house, yes, that's a cliff behind us, notice my death grip on Lydia :)  Here was a gorgeous sunset with my Aunt Lu
  We also went to the Santa Monica Pier and rode a ferris wheel, in preparation for Disneyland :)

Disneyland

  After lots of begging and whining and planning we finally got to disneyland!  I only agreed because Dave said the kids could go too :)  Dave loves disneyland, and he did a great job holding himself back so the kids could enjoy themselves too.

I always forget how HAPPY disneyland is.  Early in the morning when we were parking, we waited in line to pay the attendant and we asked how he was and he said with a HUGE smile "FANTASTIC!  AWESOME!"  It made us laugh, what do they give their employees?

  Here's autotopia, Alex did a fair job, he never hit us once :)

 Lydia was really interested in meeting Snow White, until we got there.  Here's my princess with the fake one...
  And oh, the dumbo ride... I don't like this ride, but Lydia was SOOOO excited for it so we waited 30 minutes in line for this.  Her picture didn't turn out so good, she was tired of being excited for 30 minutes too
  Besides these we went on plenty of other rides.  It was a blast, as always, and felt way more relaxed than usual this year.  Alex is tall enough to go on all the big kid rides so he did "grizzly river run", "space tours", "big thunder mountain railroad", and "soarin' over california".  He loved them, even if he held his breath the whole time :)