I know, I know… it’s now 2008 and I just started writing our summer time 2007 but hey, at least I wrote it rather than letting it fade away in my memory.
Let’s see, we had a busy and exciting summer… did lots of fun stuff. In July we went to Discovery Kingdom. It was mostly for the boys– Richard and I are not big fan of roller coasters (in fact I stay away from it!) but the weather was nice and the place was not crowded during week days. We just enjoyed the day nice and slow. August was a busy month. My parents arrived on August 1st and stayed with us for 2 1/2 months. It is always nice to see them and have them with us! Richard’s mom came about a week later. They are all coming for Ethan’s 2-year-old birthday celebration on August 11th. Ethan is a big fan of ducks so I made him a duck birthday cake (I still need to post an cake blog about it). We invited some good friends and their families and a good time was had by all. Also, when Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus were playing Belloration in the Bay Area, one of the grandma I met at the park happened to have free tickets and passed to me. So we all got to watch the show at Oakland Coliseum for free. I had never seen a circus show before and it’s quite fun and exciting. Of course the boys loved it too. Alexander still remembers the show each time he sees the Coliseum building from the BART train. In the first week of September we all flew to Cancun, Mexico for a 3-day-2 night vacation. Originally we wanted to visit San Diego but it was too expensive. We are glad we went to Cancun instead!
*** April 08 update: This draft above has been sitting in the queue way too long and it’s already spring here!… will try to write as detailed as possible as I try to remember what else we did last summer.***
It was our first time to Cancun and turned to be a great choice. We booked the vacation package through Expedia for 3 days/2 nights. To make use of most of our vacation time in Cancun, we took a late night (around 11:30pm)flight from Oakland Airport, stopped over at Mexico City around 5:30am, then finally arrived at Cancun around 9am. There are lots of hotels (including all-inclusive ones) along the coast and the resort we were staying is called Dreams Resorts & Spa. There are 3-4 restaurants and bars on the property, and since it’s an all-inclusive resort we didn’t have to pay for the food and beverages (alcohol and no-alcohol, including in-room beverages). We paid the tips though… This all-inclusive feature worked out quite nice especially when traveling with young children. It just made vacation time less stressful. Every evening the hotel will provide activity schedule for the next day (most activities are free to the guest too) and the same for children– they have a children activity center where they have activities for kids at different age, even including free day care until dinner hour if parents need some quiet dinner time. Too bad Alexander didn’t take advantage of the children center and Ethan is too young to be admitted (although he wanted to go inside the children section!).
The vacation is relaxing. In the morning before the boys woke up, I had some swimming time to myself and cleared my mind. Then we all headed for breakfast. After that we spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon on the beach. The water was very calm and shallow. I spent most of the time in the water swimming or relaxing on a floating mat. Richard did some reading and join me in the water every now and then. My dad’s arm had a wound and he avoided going into the water and thus napping pretty much most of the time on the beach. Mom decided to have some water fun as she tried to go kayaking and some swimming. Alexander and Ethan loved to play with the sand and later on enjoying some "swimming" fun as Richard and I brought them into the water. After we washed up then we went for lunch the boys took a nap until dinner time. Since the food was included the package we tended to eat more, so after dinner walk was very nice especially with the sea breeze blowing on your face. The drinks was included too so we tried all kinds of cocktail too.
The third and last day morning I went to the beach first to check if the water was nice like the day before but found out that a hurricane is on its way and throughout the night there had been some strong current along the coast and washed away lots of sand, revealing rocks underneath– totally no good to even get into the water. So I headed to the resort swimming instead. After breakfast we then get ready to check out. It was cloudy in Cancun that day and rained when we arrived at Mexico City airport. We were so lucky we caught the nice weather between 2 storms.
About 2 weeks after we came back from Cancun we went to Las Vegas for several days. Richard had a conference at Ceasar’s Palace so we decided to go along– no one can resist the temptation of Las Vegas! Few years back Richard had a conference at Ceasar’s Palace and we stayed at Flamingo at that time, so we decided that we would do the same too this time around– turned out to be big disappointment. We booked a deluxe suite, well the room is much bigger and more space for the boys, but furnishing is bad– table drawer was falling apart, lamp broken etc… and they took out the kid splashing pool that was there last visit… bummer! The boys were kind of disappointed that they didn’t have any splashing fun. Luckily they got to see the musical fountain one evening after having dinner at Bellagio. The performance was amazing and we all had a wonderful time watching it. I was having a cold and just started recovering on the way back. Overall the trip wasn’t bad– We had lots of good seafood buffets and I had some time playing slot machines while either my parents or Richard watch the boys.
So you can see we really had a wonderful summer 2007. Sorry it took me so long to write it and for you to read it 🙂 This coming summer will be different for us but just as exciting (and probably chaotic too!) as we’ll be welcoming our baby girl to family. Looking forwards to meeting little Audrey!
Queen of the Chennaults 