California | family.derecola

The week of Halloween, we took a family vacation to San Diego. We’d been before, but wanted to get away to somwhere with warmer weather, sun, relatively cheap flights, and the same time zone. We looked at a few different cities and ended up in San Diego when we found the perfect rental for our needs. We’ve found that condo or house rentals work really well for us and usually are the same price as a family-friendly room(s) or chepaer. Having Dom sleep in our hotel room isn’t an option — we moved him to his crib at three weeks. :-) This was also the first time we bought Dom an airplane seat (yay Alaska Airlines $99 companion fare!) and that was simply amazing.

We aren’t big beach people, and Dom isn’t an all-day-of-anything type of person, so we stayed in a house on the bay in Mission Beach. We’re also on a one nap schedule, so we wanted to be close to things without having to drive all over the city. We were within walking distance of Belmont Park, the beach, and a few restaurants (with bars!) so our days generally consisted of a “San Diego” activity in the morning and then walking somewhere in the afternoon. Dom’s pretty easy to entertain at this age, so he loved nearly everything we did – the zoo, the park, time on the beach, walks, museums, tattoo parlor… whatever.

The beauty of a one nap schedule is you’re limited in what you can do, assuming you want to respect the nap (and we very much do). This is good for us because we are the type of travelers that try to see and do as much as possible. Having a mid-day nap forces us to slow down, relax, and actually take a vacation; not “travel.” The result is I take four naps in a week. I don’t think I’d taken more than that many since Dom has been born. I’m just plain bad at it… except when I’m on vacation, apparently. We also got some grown up time, which was great.

Oh, and we were delayed coming home for a few hours because it was snowing it Seattle. Ha.

Three months ago*, we took our first family trip/vacation to Napa. We wanted to get Dom on a plane early and we like to travel, so we picked a place that was the same time zone and only a few hours away to minimize the chance of making a horrible mistake. The good news is Dom did about as well as we could have hoped; we also learned that he’s entirely too big to be a lap infant.

Napa itself was a nice break from a pretty crappy spring in Seattle. It was in the 70s and 80s over the course of our stay and we got to soak up the sunshine to recharge our batteries. I think it’s a nice place to visit, but I’m not sure it’s somewhere I’d have to go again. I don’t know if we’d have a different opinion if we didn’t have an infant with us, although I will say we did get time away from him thanks to our fantastic nanny riding along for a few days. We even managed to treat ourselves to a private winery tour sans Dom, which made the most of a few hours of grown up time. The rest of the week, we relaxed in our apartment and at various locations around the valley. There’s really only so much you can do when you’re limited to three hours between naps. Mostly it was just a way for us to spend time together as a family. In that sense, we were very successful. We learned about traveling with a kid, we got to spend an uninterrupted week together, and we have these pictures where Dom already looks so young compared to how he looks today.

I’m not sure Dom will remember any of it, but we will. Oh, we went to Morimoto’s restaurant – it was awesome.

*It took us a year to do Vietnam, so we’re improving… right?