Fool Me Once

April started with an EPIC parenting moment when we froze Tycho’s cereal and replaced Nova’s with lego for April Fool’s Day. 10/10, will probably do next year. But joke’s on us, they got strep throat for the second time just a couple weeks after the first and we ended up pivoting our spring break trip from Hawaii to San Diego! (It didn’t help that poor O’ahu was supposed to get another crazy big storm just a few weeks after all the flooding….)

It ended up being the perfect trip for us. A little shorter, a little less water-based, but we leaned hard into recent themes of space, baseball, and museums! We had watched the Artemis II mission launch (right after swim class) earlier and had been tracking their location so when we realized that splashdown was going to be off the coast of San Diego while we were there, we knew we had to prioritize it! Thanks to Max’s museum app, we figured out we could get a membership to Hiller Aviation Museum near us and get into the Air & Space Museum in San Diego for free, which turned out to be the pro move for the splashdown party because they let us skip the line?! So many space nerds and overstimulated kids. It was great! And we found a vegan tiki bar with the premise that a space mission crash-landed on a tropical planet?! Perfectly on theme.

Balboa Park was really the best place to try out museum app, because we got to go to the Air & Space Museum twice, the Museum of Natural History (we saw a sunfish skeleton!), Fleet Science Center (like the Exploratorium, except less cool, but with a giant ball pit that Nova almost drowned in!), and the Japanese Friendship Garden. We also went to the New Children’s Museum downtown which was really just like an art museum that’s interactive and highly engaging for everyone. Nova and Kristan had so much fun exploring this crazy fort that took up half a floor!

Last but not least for San Diego highlights was staying at the Omni Hotel downtown which has its own private entrance to the Padres stadium. Nova and Kristan bailed from the game earlier, but Tycho and Max stayed til the end and were back in our room within about five minutes, amazing! Tycho can’t wait to go back. We got to see a Giants game this month too but it wasn’t nearly as exciting.

Then back to home and simpler delights. Nova got to use a real knife to help carve part of her class art project, a giant weaving that we were able to get at the art show fundraiser. Tycho did his third “Walkathon” at school and was aiming for 45 laps or 4.5 miles, and was super proud of himself for doing 50 laps, the most of anyone in his class! Meanwhile we know where he gets it because Max and Kristan went to Napa for a night so she could run a half marathon with her friends. (Also we went to a tiki bar and an art museum… because we could!) The kids’ first babysitter overnight! It went so well! Everyone involved had a blast, haha.

So themes of the month: museums, space, baseball, running, tiki bars, art. April was a good month :)