Hello, Old Friend

This morning, I decided to check out all the "new" comments to my blog...you know...all the ones from the last 3 months. I honestly didn't think that I would pick this up again. I'm a seasonal doer of anything. I do it for a while and then I stop. But I've had some people ask me when I would be blogging again, so for today, I'm back.

We celebrated Isabella's 2nd birthday yesterday. She's growing into a beautiful, fun and sweet little girl. We spent most of the afternoon at the beach. This is, of course, after we spent 2 hours looking for parking. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but I've never spent more than 5 minutes looking for parking at Seal Beach. We spent what felt like hours driving past full parking spots and No Parking on Monday signs only to end up in the pay parking lot with a pay machine that would not accept my credit card. An old surfer told me that apparently that part of the contraption wasn't working yet and I could go to the ATM at the liquor store. After leaving the parking lot and almost coming to blows with the ATM at said liquor store because it didn't want to read my card the first 5 times I swiped it, I got my $20, quietly returned to the passenger seat of the car and we returned to the parking lot.

Returning to the payment machine with my $20 in hand, I thought I'd have my parking ticket in no time. Wrong. I put the bill in the machine. Twice. Fail. Fail. Then some nice people came up behind me, and I switched bills with them. Fail. Again. And again. And again. So I asked if they would like to go ahead of me so that I can find the man patrolling with the ticket book, explain to him my sob story and pay him the whole flipping $20 (it's only $6 to park all day) just so he won't give me what's probably a $100 ticket for parking illegally...which, by the way, we were about to do.

Because God knew that I was about to hurt someone, he sent a nice man in a red truck to the ladies at the payment machine. The man offered them his all day parking ticket. They had already gotten their ticket, so they yelled over to me that he was giving up his ticket. I walked over to the lady with the ticket in her hand, thanked her profusely, threw the ticket on the dash of my car and went about my day incident-free.

And not only was it homicide-free, it was actually enjoyable. Bella loved playing in the water. She was soaked and so was I after the myriad of "Come on, Mommy"'s I got from her at water's edge. We took some breaks from the waves to dig in the sand and fly her kite (which Daddy put together and held most of the time). After a couple hours of that, we got some lunch at the NY pizza shop on Main Street. I call it a shop because it feels like a real pizza shop. It's super good. Bella enjoyed her pesto pizza and lemonade, as well as the fruit snacks she was given by the pizza man.

Last night, a couple of friends came over unexpectedly for Bella's birthday cake which was fun for the girls (and boy) as well as the parents. This was a good impromptu party considering I must have been delusional planning Bella's party for a Saturday. But more on that later.

Happy St. Patrick's Day. I'm off to prepare Bella for a different kind of birthday treat...her 2 year Doctor's visit. Woot.