CA Vacation 2009- Leg 1

I arrived home from my trip to Pittsburgh around midnight on Thursday, after having been gone since the previous Sunday AM. We sent the kids to daycare and spent the day catching up on bills, packing, and preparing to be gone from home for 12 days. We left Boise around 5PM on Friday and drove to Tahoe, arriving there at 2AM our time. Mom must have anxiously been awaiting our arrival, because she greeted us at our car! The kids were troopers on the drive and slept the last three hours. We spent most of Saturday in Tahoe with Nana and after a rough morning patch, had a great day at the park and lunch out before we packed up the kids and headed (slowly... due to CA traffic!) down to San Ramon to see Auntie Sue and Grandma Mary.

The kids were greeted with an array of gifts welcoming their arrival: new cups/plates, coloring books, beach towels, new stuffed animals with themed books and pajamas for all. We spent the next two days trying to visit with as many friends in the Bay Area that we could (never enough time to catch up with everyone!), eating too much food (thanks, Auntie Sue and Mary!) and watching the kids revel in the full on attention they got from two of their favorite people in the world.

All was well until the first night when I put Faith to bed. She was exhausted and actually asked to go to sleep before her brothers. I put her down, then a few minutes later heard her crying and crying. She sounded scared. Sure enough, when I went to find out what was wrong, she pointed to the item in the picture above- which was in her direct line of vision about a foot from where she slept on the floor- and said, "I NO LIKE DA BIG FEET MOMMY!". I tried to make her see that they were not attached to an actual person, but this did more harm than good, I think. She made me remove the table from her room and then close the door to the room in which they were now housed. The rest of the visit she walked timidly by that door, shying away from the room and saying, "Big feet in der. I no like them. Dey scare me!".