Come and ride the train!

Today we headed to Santa Cruz to ride a steam train into the redwood forest.  Trains, trees, steam whistles, talk about your recipe for boy adventure!  It was a beautiful day to be outside rolling through ancient redwoods.

The train ride itself was pretty amazing, but what was equally as amazing was the fact that I would consider our approach to this trip to be *almost* breezy.  Breezy as in the old way Chris and I approached weekends- before kids and diaper bags and two car seats and a mental checklist of things that I should have with me that includes extra pants, band aids and butt wipes.  At 9:45 Chris looked at me and said "I was thinking we would go ride the rain in Santa Cruz today.  It leaves at 11 and takes 50 minutes to get there".  All four of us were in our PJs.  I looked at him blankly for a precious few seconds then heard myself say "Okay".  Once the words were off my tongue were were off and running.  Boys were changed and dressed, Chris and I threw clothes on, I threw whole boxes of snacks into a giant reusable shopping bag, grabbed my camera and we were out the door.  The drive went smoothly except for the moment of weakness about 10 minutes into it where we almost bailed.  Thankfully we pushed on.  We arrived at the train station with 4 minutes to spare and a 3 minute walk to the ticket booth.  We ended up running the whole way holding the boys but we made it.  Take that spontaneity; we still got it. 

 This was a very sweet moment where Brody was fishing pretzels out of Chris's mouth.  Then Chris asked Brody if he was a baby bird. :) 

The outing ended with a trip to Whole Foods for some pumpkin beer and other fall items.  Both boys were yelling 'beer' at the top of their lungs while we were shopping causing many shoppers and employees to laugh out loud.  I will add 'beer' to the list of kind of random, adorably cute thing that they now say, a growing list that includes the words football, burpies (so so cute), Go Blue, and angry (something mom must say often enough to have caused repeating.  hummm). 

Since I'm already writing, I should add that the night before our train adventure, we had a really nice super causal dinner out with the boys.  On a whim, we headed to a local brewery with good food for a quick bite to eat.  The boys did great and even colored primarily on the paper instead of the table.  Chris gave them a quick math lesson and now when you ask them what the square root of four is, they yell two.  After dinner we walked(!) downtown to a local book store and picked up some new books.  It felt kind of surreal to be able to do this kind of outing with our boys.  The sidewalks were crowded and it was dark and we were walking along like we belonged!  I will remember this night for a long time!