Family Weekend

First water polo tournament of Bean's last season made a good excuse to head to San Diego for the weekend. Bean played great-- scored a goal against the UCSD A team and had some amazing defensive moves. They only won one of the three games, but they played really well.

After the games on Saturday, we went down to Sunset Cliffs, which turned out to be a very popular place for Valentine's--so many couples having picnics and we even caught a proposal.

Family Valentine's Day together!

Love the beautiful clouds, even if it did subdue the sunset.

And then we went down to Chula Vista for some Tacos El Gordo. The lines were crazy long, but waiting in that line, looking around at all the people from all over--just made me grateful for this America, with tacos and diversity and communities of people from all over the world. This is the America I choose. (And those tacos are dang good.)

Sunday morning, we were back at the pool for the best game of their tournament, even if they came up a little short. Bean skipped out on the last one so we could go to church with her and meet all of her friends. She's got such a great life down here.

We went to La Jolla Shores after church for the low tide.

I was hoping for some nudibranchs and maybe even an octopus, which we didn't find,

but there were lots of great worm holes,

and I did find my first tidepool lobster!

He cruised along this rock, and then crossed over to a spot of thicker algae and tucked himself in where he could hide.

These little family moments are always so great. I miss the days when it was easy to all be together, and we are definitely missing Bug these days, but it's also fun to see the lives that our kids are making for themselves as they go out into the world.

Celebrating Daddy-o in the Best Way

Daddy-o had a birthday this week and while his birthday was a day full of school and work, we surprised him with a pizza crawl in San Francisco scheduled for the weekend. I picked 4 places that offered pizza by the slice in 3 different neighborhoods to try and we had a fabulous day!

Besides the pizza, we also walked around a little between places (had to keep our appetites up so we weren't forcing pizza down by the end, haha.) It was an absolutely gorgeous day and we started in the neighborhood south of Golden Gate Park (Inner Sunset) and then went to the Mission District, so we walked over to Delores Park for the views. Also stopped by the Dog Eared Books for bit and picked up Amy Tan's Backyard Bird Chronicles for me (I offered to buy Daddy-o and birthday book, but he declined so I figured I should get me a book, haha.)

Exploring those two areas took all afternoon so it was basically dinner by the time we headed to North Beach for the final two spots. We had saved Tony's for this point because it gets such high ratings so I figured we shouldn't start with what was likely going to be the best pizza. And it was really good pizza.

And then we went to Golden Boy which was the most unique style of pizza of the day (more of a deep dish, where the other three were thin crust.)  We grabbed some amazing gelato to finish off the night before we headed home.

We didn't eat any bad pizza the whole day. Arizmendi Bakery only has one flavor a day, and the mushroom with ginger and sesame oil was surprisingly delicious (and the scone we got to split was delicious!) Tony's had an amazing veggie pizza with so many toppings and great, floppy, NY style crust, Golden Boy was good, but the overall winner was Hi Hat! Daddy-o loved the spicy vodka and thought the crust was the best we had all day, and their other pizzas flavors were so good, too.

The best part is that there are still so many pizza places to try so we can do this again! (And Tony is opening a new place in Livermore, so maybe we'll need to do this with a few of our local places when that happens, although I can only think of one other place that does pizza by the slice.)

Happy Birthday, Daddy-o!