It's been a wild ride

Now we can finally get to the fun stuff! At the end of January, we had our first adventure packed weekend. On Thursday night, we met up in Walnut Creek with some of our friends from BYU who moved out here back in the summer. We went to the Buckhorn Grill and it was so good! But it was even better to get to see familiar faces. We miss everyone in Utah so much and we LOVED getting to catch up with our friends. Thanks for making that happen!

Andrew had Friday off, so we went hiking at the Black Diamond mines which are pretty close to us. It was a lot different than hiking in the mountains, but we had fun and got to hang out with lots of cows. That night, a family in our ward invited us and a couple other families over for a game night. We kept Adaline up way past her bedtime, but it was a blast and it was great to get to know some people from the ward. (P.S. We love our ward. Another family had us over for dinner, and we also discovered that a girl from Andrew's major is in our ward-how crazy.)

She's a very slow hiker for now.

So green!!

Adaline just sat down and had a picnic while enjoying the view.

Looking out over Antioch

On Saturday, we tried to head out early but Matthew insisted on sleeping in. Nevertheless, we went to IKEA to try and get our apartment more organized and to eat lunch. After that, we met Andrew's work friend and his wife at the beach. He's been training Andrew and they're the only ones at the plant that went to BYU, so they became friends really fast. We played in the sand and the waves (freezing!) for a while, and then Andrew went off with Alex and his wife to learn how to surf. Andrew didn't have a wet suit so it took him about 30 minutes to stop shaking after getting out, but he said he had lots of fun and wants to try it again. I hung out on the beach with the kids-Adaline could play in the sand for-ev-er.

The next weekend, we wanted to go check out Walnut Creek a little more. We just went to the shopping area near where we had eaten dinner before, but it's huge-you could easily spend a whole day there. That night we went to a Valentine's Day party at the McCullough's. They are the nicest people and it was so fun! We played games (the newlywed game and one where the guys had to draw their first date with their wives and then we all had to guess which was which), ate delicious(!!!) food, and chatted. It was great to get out of the house and hang out with adults. We are making friends!

Just a random picture of Adaline in an outfit from Great Granny Peggy

Our next adventure was one of my favorites. Friday was fairly uneventful-mostly errands. In the morning, we drove around Pittsburg a little bit because we only go to church, Costco, and WinCo, and we wanted to see what else there was. Turns out there isn't much. Pittsburg isn't tiny, but it's all houses and apartments. We drove over to old Pittsburg and played at a park, but there wasn't a whole lot going on. Saturday was Valentine's Day, but we pretty much ignored that aside from our heart-shaped pancakes.

Apparently it was a little too early for Adaline

We got an early start on the day and made it to Muir Woods National Park-it includes 240 acres of redwoods forest and another then another 300 acres of protected land-before we had to park a mile away from the entrance (which was super impressive because it was a free entrance day). We started out by veering off the path. I'm so glad we did! Both kids were content in their carriers, and Andrew and I got to do a fun hike. It was a couple miles, had some steep parts, and involved bridges and ducking under/climbing over trees. We loved it. It eventually looped back to the main "boardwalk" and just before it got to that part, we found some huge redwoods. All the trees we passed were soooooo tall, but these were just huge-and they aren't even the super famous huge ones. Once we made it back to the main area, I hiked out to the car to get our lunch. (We added it up and hiked at least 5 miles that day.) We ate and then let Adaline run around for a long time. We finally decided to leave and it took Adaline about 2 minutes to fall asleep riding on Andrew's back on the way back to the car-it was so cute.

This is one tree. With a hole in it bigger than our tent.

All the trees were SO tall (and about 1000 years old)

Seems like a reasonably sized step for a 1-year-old

Next we wanted to get an early dinner at a mexican place that, according to ESPN's FiveThirtyEight has "America's Best Burrito"-a nationwide competition that they recently won. (They had tons of awards/plaques up inside.) It was only 18 miles from where we were, but I think it took us an hour and a half (maybe more) to get there. There are so many people in San Francisco! Plus, we had to cross the Golden Gate bridge to get there, and basically going across any bridge equals lots of congestion. But...it was really cool to see it up close and to get a cool view of the ocean.

We had a better view than the picture makes it seem. So much ocean!

We found the La Taqueria easily and Andrew is amazing and found a parking spot RIGHT across the street. Parking in the city is so stressful to me, so that was awesome. Our burritos were, admittedly, delicious but might have tasted even better if not for the hype. Then we headed home (which means we spent two hours sitting in traffic while Matthew screamed).

For the record, I didn't not take this picture, I just pulled it off the google search.

The next week was so fun...not. We were all sick. I had a fever for at least 3 days, Adaline had a cough, Andrew had cold symptoms, and Matthew was okay but then got it later. By Saturday I was feeling a little better, but we just ran a few errands and tried to recover.

Shout out to the Norway cousins! I got these while we were visiting them back in April (you know, before we had the ultrasound telling us that Matthew was a boy-mother's intuition at it's best.)

No, I did not tell her to suck on her hands, they're just good at being twins.

They ADORE each other