Oh! This is what it's like to have friends!

Maren Hanchen and Dylan loving the jellies at Monterey Bay Aquarium

We spent this last weekend with our friends, the Hanchens. Between the two families we had 6 kids to entertain. It's always so much work with just our kids, I was afraid 6 kids just might kill me. I couldn't be more wrong. The boys had the time of their lives with the girls. They spent the whole weekend playing with the girls. Owen was Maren's shadow practically the whole weekend. She was so patient and kind to Owen, that he couldn't leave her alone. Dylan and McKenna hung out together a bit, which was nice since they are about the same age. Brandon played with everyone. A highlight of the weekend wasn't the Monterey Bay Aquarium (2 kids asked if we could go home within 1o minutes) or the beach with all the treasures to be collected in buckets and hauled home just to sit in the same buckets in the garage never to be seen again...no, it had to be running around the yard capturing and innocently tormenting lizard after lizard. I couldn't watch the kids with the lizards for more than five minutes (sorry, no pics of this). I kept wincing thinking that this next moment one of the little critters was going to become road kill from over zealous feet. At least the lizards were able to "escape" from their enclosure at night. We parents felt so bad for the little critters, they had to be released from their pink plastic box of a home. Poor things were probably too stunned to move more than a couple feet that night.

When the kids were finally in bed at night, we would have some adult time around the fire outside. It came up that the last time the 4 of us were in Santa Cruz together was our 1st wedding anniversary in 2002. It doesn't seem possible that it's been almost 8 years. Back before children. I think that's when everything changed for us. Children. Our own and everyone else's kids. The life we were used to became irrelevant. The kids became the focus, so we threw ourselves into it as we should have. But at the same time, we stopped making time for our friends and didn't realize what we lost until this last weekend. Time to reorganize our life and make time for the people who we have unintentionally shelved but have always been important to us.

Maren and Brandon found many treasure washed up on the beach. Here they are collecting shells and rocks with Maren's dad, Scott Hanchen, at Rio Del Mar Beach.