Wannabe Balanced Mom 2012: San Diego Trip Part 1

We recently got back from a 10 day trip to San Diego and I tell yah, it was absolutely AMAZING! We've never spent much time in San Diego, I don't know why. We try to take a nice trip once a year and in the past we've mostly done Cruises. I always thought that cruising was the way to go when you have small children. I've totally changed my mind. Our last trip we flew to Florida for a Caribbean Cruise on SouthWest which is something I do NOT recommend, especially if you have kids with you. You'll have at least 2 lay overs, which makes things very stressful with long flights, ugh! Talk about a pain in the... So anyway, by the time we got home from that trip, I felt like I needed a vacation from vacation. I was completely wiped out and felt like it was more work than it was worth. So this year we decided to forgo the airplane and take a nice long road trip to sunny California. I was dreading the drive a little, but thankfully we were able to stop in St. George and stay at our house there for a few days before making the rest of the drive. It takes 4 hours to get to St. George, then another 6 1/2 to 7 to get to San Diego. I had it all planned out though. I made up a fun schedule to follow to make the time go by faster. For example, we started by watching a movie (I was sure to get a new one specifically for the trip), then we read books for 30 minutes, played games for 30 minutes (I found some fun road trip games online using good ol' google), colored pictures for 30 minutes, played ipad games for 30 minutes, did school work for 30 minutes, ect, then we'd repeat the whole thing until the drive was over. I made everyone fun little snack packs full of healthy foods and a few treats. I made little binders for Oliver and Lily with lots of different printouts, like a map of Utah and California, bingo, word searches, coloring pages of the Utah and California state flags, birds, flowers, ect. I tried to throw in educational information to share with them about each state. I also got a bunch of dollar toys and gave them one about every hour or so. They loved that. We rented a beach house on Mission Bay which is right across the street to Mission Beach. Everything about this location was absolutely perfect. Here's a picture of the house we stayed in.

We stayed in the bottom level of this place. Loved that we are literally ON the beach. Made going to the beach with kids a lot less stressful. Usually you have to haul all kinds of stuff, taking multiple trips to and from the car just to get set up. Then of course there's always something you forget to bring, like the sun screen, extra clothes, drinks, you name it. So it was nice, because if we forgot something, just head right back into the house to get it. I also loved being on the bay side since we still have small children and the waves can be a little daunting to them. They got to play in the water without the constant worry that the waves would carry them out to sea :). We still got to play in the waves, just walk across the street and we were there. Just perfect! Oh and another nice thing about being right on the beach is that Brooklyn could still take her naps. I was sure to bring the video monitor so that we could play outside but I was still able to listen for her when she woke up.