Pennies In My Couch: No Trophies On The Beach!

I know, it's been a month since I've posted! There is a good reason for that, though, and I will get to that in a later post. In the meantime, I'm going to jump right back in where I left off... in February!

In February a friend emailed and said that she was planning a day of whale watching and invited us along! I was stoked, as I had been wanting to take Jack and Dave and I had actually been planning on taking him that week. Since our friends were going, though, we decided to skip our trip and Jack and I would join up with our friends. My mom offered to watch Sam for me, and Jack and I were so excited to have a "Special mommy and Jack Jack day" with our friends! We love having daddy and Sammy with us but we definitely need to do that more often!

The day started off with great hilarity. Jack is really into reading signs and interpreting what a sign is trying to depict... I didn't take a picture of the "Pier Rules" sign (must have forgotten as I was laughing so hard), but it was a typical red-circle-with-a-line-through-it-over-forbidden-item type sign, similar to this one (except, you know, in English).

When Jack saw it, he excitedly started interpreting the sign aloud... "No dogs, no skateboards, no guns..." And when he came to the symbol on the sign that looked like this:

He only paused for a split second before continuing with "...no trophies". I died laughing, as did our friends and the people in line behind us. Then I told Jack that he was absolutely correct, and it was a trophy!!!

Jack also was fixated on the name of the boat we were on... The Voyager. If he said the name once, he must have said it a hundred times! Of course, I always want to remember everything my kids say and do, so I took a picture of the logo on the boat to help me remember!

When it was time to get on the boat, the three boys were thrilled! Jack had never been whale watching, Austin had been once about 6 months earlier, and E was an old pro as his mommy is a little whale-crazy (I love that about her!)... when we got on the boat Jack and Austin immediately sat down on the bench while E immediately hopped up and looked out over the water.

Ang and I quickly set our boys straight, though, and stood them up to look out over the water.

Jack was soooo excited when the boat started moving and he was pointing things out left and right and up and down! "Look mom! Seaweed!" "Look mom! A kayak!" "Look mom! Trash!"

He was super excited when we got outside the breakwater and started going faster. He declared that going fast was his favorite part (which, after observing him encourage his pedal-to-the-metal father to drive our boat even faster, surprised no one), and he was really excited when we finally came to The Buoy that is home to many California Sea Lions.

And he was stoked when one waved his fin to us in a "Hello!"

As we made our way out to where we were hoping to find whales, the boys were entertained by Austin's monster trucks...

And pretty soon, we saw the telltale water spout!

Jack surprised me by how earnestly he watched for the next spout... I thought for sure he'd lose interest in the excitement in between spouts. Instead, he spotted some before I did and was entranced by them. I was really thrilled by how excited he was and how he was so focused on the whales. He watched them and studied them, and he even stared out over the water waiting for them to surface next, even when they were down for a while!