Santa Rosa trip

Have I told you how great my mom is? She's pretty great. She took Azadeh to Santa Rosa a while back to visit the Charles Schultz museum, and they spent just a couple hours at the Children's Museum on the next block, and it was super cool. 

So she has informally adopted a couple additional grandkids (their grandparents live far away, and Mom has a close friendship with their mom), and she wanted to take them down there. But she figured it might be good if we could sort of all go and tag team a bit. We needed it, too! We hadn't been there five minutes before Lochlan ran out of the motel naked and ran laps around the pool.

Anyway, on the way down we stopped at the Jelly Belly factory. No candy was being made because they shut down once a year to clean and inspect everything. But I actually went once before during the shutdown, and it's not that bad -- they still have a lot of machinery to see and videos to watch (and they were still sorting and bagging candy that was already made), and they've added some interactive features like games, Snapchat filters, and smell stations. 

Pretty much the only one of us who managed to look cute in a paper hat. 

I only took a picture of the Whiz-lifter because it sounded like something you'd find in an old man's medicine cabinet. 

Then we drove to Santa Rosa and checked into the Best Western. It was nice! We had adjoining rooms, and the gated pool was right outside our sliding glass door. 

To quote Steve Carell, "I love lamp!" (Seriously, though, you could plug your devices into it!). 

I'll mostly skip over the evening and morning, but it involved a LOT of running, yelling, turning on of staticky Mexican music, a restaurant with dark wood paneling and a lot of beer steins and pictures of children hunting, some puking, multiple doors through which toddlers could escape, someone very small who rolls and farts in his sleep so that I must play flatulence goalie so he doesn't fall off the bed (he did once anyway), and... very little downtime. Luckily, Boompah had sent a care package of airplane booze.

After breakfast, we went to the Children's Museum of Sonoma County. IT. WAS. AWESOME.

I mean... it was like if the Exploratorium was a bit more focused on smaller kids, only cost $12, and there was no line. I couldn't even begin to tell you how many things there were to explore, play with, climb on... and Lochlan and I didn't even see 50% of it, I'm sure.

Highlights were the train play area, the garden, the ornithopter, the "river" (and other water play), the dentist and doctor offices, the puppet theater, and -- though I only saw it from afar, the bubbles. I kept trying to get him to go in there, as there was a thing where you could pull a rope and pull a giant bubble wand UP AROUND YOU LIKE A BUBBLE ROOM. A bubble room, is what I'm saying, and he wanted to sit in a helicopter. Whatever.

Lochlan declared this pillowy area the eagle's nest. 

This was his favorite. He played on it for ages. The funniest part was when another little girl and he had an argument over whether they were really flying or just pretending (Lochlan took the "really flying" stance). At one point, she marched down the ramp, crouched down to look at the front wheel, then called him to come out. He marched down the ramp, crouched next to her, and she pointed. "Look, the wheel's stuck." "Oh," he said, "the wheel's stuck." 

At one point when I tried to get him to come out, he said, "I can't; I'm flying right now." 

I probably should not have let him take this puppet out of the puppet theater, but he LOVED it. 

Az was doing her own thing the whole time, and we rarely crossed paths with her, so I only really got this crabby I-have-to-wait-in-line-for-the-bathroom picture. 

L declared this his "office." 

Anyway, we had a great time, and if that museum was closer we'd definitely visit more often.