christmas eve, eve in san francisco...

So far Christmas break has consisted of a few small outings and a lot of sleeping in.  The kids have played at a friend's house, gone to the movies, a Cal basketball game and on the eve of Christmas eve we visited San Francisco with Papa and Emay.

BART was crowed when we first boarded the train.  Landon had to sit on my lap for the first two stops.

Is it just me or did Landon inherit my "rainbow eyes"?

After the train cleared a bit Landon went and stood with Chris and Ashlyn sat with me.  She was kind enough to share her headphones with me.  It is so nice when your kids listen to decent music and are willing to share it with you!  It definitely made the trip go a little faster.  

We met up with Papa and Emay and ate a light lunch before hopping on a cable car…
The trip to the city was for our annual holiday visit but it also happened to be Emay's birthday.  Two reasons to celebrate!

The kids were dying to see China town.  I don't think they were as impressed as they thought they would be.  Landon found this statue and wondered if this would count as his AR reading for the day.  Nice try.
We made our way to Union Square which was bustling with people shopping for the holidays.  The kids loved watching the ice skaters circle around the ice skating rink and wanted to try skating themselves.  Chris looked into it and it was a good two hour wait!  Needless to say, we decided to hold off on ice skating.

We went into Neiman Marcus and traveled up the escalators to the highest point so that we could look at their giant tree.  As we were looking down Hal mentioned that he could probably spit on someone from that high up and no one would catch him because by the time they figured it out he would be long gone.  I mentioned that I had gum in my mouth and could probably peg someone pretty well with it from this height.  Jenny apologized for the fact that I was a sweet girl before I married into the Johnson family.  

We continued on to Ghirardelli Square.  We were standing in the courtyard while Papa and Landon were in one of the shops and I watched as Ashlyn cautiously examined the mermaid fountain.  As she circled the statue I pointed this out to Chris and told him that I bet she was about to come and tell us that the statue was inappropriate.   Minutes later Ashlyn walked up and informed us that the statues were "totally inappropriate" and that the topless mermaids needed seashells like Ariel on The Little Mermaid.

One of the kids' favorite parts of the trip was when they visited the San Francisco Maritime National Park and walked the boats with Chris and Hal.

Chris thought that from this angle it looked like they were relocating Alcatraz.  

When I took this picture of Chris and the kids they said it looked like I was bobbing up and down.  The boat they were on was rocking quite a bit …which is the main reason that I wasn't on it!
We ate dinner at Scoma's and then made the trek from pier 42 down the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building.  

We told the kids that we would check out the ice skating rink in Justin Herman Plaza since the one in Union Square was packed.  They were thrilled when they found out they would get to skate.

They actually did a pretty good job!  They were able to keep their balance the majority of the time despite the fact that the ice had some major divots & chunks.  

It was a beautiful day.