Only Tourists call it SanFran...

 

Look at that!  My friends, that is me and my baby girl right before we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge.  For my birthday weekend I got to go to Ikea AND spend the weekend with my family and our girl scout sisters in San Francisco!  It was my FIRST TIME THERE!  What?  How can I live four hours away and NEVER HAVE GONE TO SF?  How can we have gone to NYC TWICE since moving to Reno and still not taken a weekend trip to SF?  Because, my friends, we are ridiculous.  I'm not sure if you've heard, but San Francisco is pretty fabulous.  

In Girl Scouts there's this thing called "Bridging" where when you graduate from a level, you're supposed to symbolically walk across a bridge and be greeted on the other side by the next level of girl scouts.  One of our Girl Scout moms found out about this program where you can walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.  SIGN ME UP!

Here is my Bridge Walk Selfie.   (There were people with selfie sticks ALL OVER SF.  For reals.  They weren't even embarrassed about it.  They should have been.)

 

Here's the girls after we finished the walk.  Don't they look like they could be on the brochure for How To Be A Fabulous Girl Scout?  Yep. (That is not Ella's Bear, BTW.  We're not cool enough to have that accessory.)

 Our hotel was centrally located, which means we thought we could walk everywhere.  By the end of the day, one of our little friends' pedometer said she'd walked EIGHTEEN MILES.  I didn't quite believe the accuracy of that claim (the pedometer, of course I believe our friend!), but I'd bet we walked over 13 miles.  With 10 year olds.  It's not our muscles that hurt, it was EVERYTHING.  Ella kept saying, "My feet are so sore!  Not like in one spot, just EVERYWHERE!".  Yep.  You know when you walk around all day and then at the end your feet just ache when you stand up?  Like, "Nooooooooooooooo!  Not again!"  That.

 But we didn't stop.  Instead we went to Alkatraz.

 You take a ferry there.  No, there weren't any sharks.

 But there is an audio tour.  So basically it's a bunch of people meandering around a big empty prison in silence.  That's not weird.

 Gretchen was a little creeped out by the whole thing.  The audio tour had "Sound Effects".  Do you know what it sounds like when someone get's shanked?  We do now!

Also, there was a dummy head from the infamous breakout/unsolved mystery.  They had it laying on the bed with blankets around it to look like a body.  It was SUPER CREEPY.  Gretchen thought they put a real head on the bed and it was NOT OK.  Even after we explained that it was just a statue, she still had a hard time getting to sleep for a few weeks.  Poor kid.

 Just chillin' in the prison dining room with dad...

 

 The Alkatraz ferry had pretzels.  That made life better...

After our marathon day, we slept HARD.  But we also wanted to get the most of our last morning in the city, so we met our peeps in Chinatown.  AND took a trolly ride!  That was a lovely $27 lift up a hill in an old-timey wooden car.  Have you heard how expensive San Francisco is?  Yeah, they weren't lying... 

 

 

Enjoying your trolley ride sweetie?  IT'S THREE DOLLARS PER MINUTE!  #$&@#$ ENJOY IT!

 

 

 Chinatown is awesome and we love it. 

For reals.

So these pics are NOT from San Francisco, but were on my phone and I wanted to share.  A farm in Spanish Springs had the brilliant event, "Baby Animal Days".  For two days they opened their pumpkin patch farm up to the public to share all their baby animals!  It was pretty much a cute overload.  You couldn't walk two feet without either hearing, or yourself saying, "AwwwwWWWwwwWWW!"

  

She's not really strangling the goat.  See?  It's smiling...

 

 

And then it was the collaborative art auction at the girl's school, which I missed for reasons I'll explain in a bit.  The piece above is called "100 First Grade Hearts".  My friend Michon & I are crazy and when to 4 classes to have each kid make a heart, which we combined and framed in this fabulous antique frame that my other friend donated to the cause.  It was pretty much awesome ifIdosaysomyself....  If I had a billion dollars, I would have put my hat in the bidding ring for it... You can't tell in this picture, but it's made up of acrylic, glitter paper, watercolor, oil pastel, tin, and MORE. 

 

 

And in Gretchen's class, we used manipulative hipster lyrics to trick people into spending more billions of dollars to support our school.  Each kid drew their "home".  Can you guess which one's is Gretchen's?  

(it's the yellow one in the middle!!!  Doesn't it look JUST LIKE our house!?!?!  I know, she's brilliant...)  

Ella's class project turned out pretty cool too (we acutally had to re-do it cause the first attempt was NOT COOL.  But onwards and upwards, it came together in the end.  And then I forgot to snap a photo on my phone.  Whoops!  I've got a picture of it somewheres....

Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter....

 

I was not at the fabulous art auction, because I was IN SEATTLE!!!!  I got to spend the weekend with my two BFFS!  First Lismarie picked me up from the airport and we got to spend a glorious evening eating the best strip-mall Thai food in Southcenter, then we got to stay up until midnight talking, then we got to go to Goodwill AND Target to shop, and lunch, and then the ferry to Seattle.  I KNOW!  But then it wasn't over, cause Lismarie helped me sneak into Janeece's house so we could set up her SURPRISE 40th BIRTHDAY PARTY!!!  It was so awesome!  Huge props to Mr. Janeece for arranging it all.  Saturday J and I got to get our nails did real pretty, then took the bus downtown and shopped and shopped and shopped.  We even got to go to the Japanese Dollar Store and get treasures for the girls.  I know!  Best weekend ever!  

  

And life just keeps getting even more exciting, cause look what they got at Costco.  CHICKEN COOPS!!!  WHAT?!!?!!  Should we get one?  (Spoiler alert:  WE DID!)