When the cousins in Orange County invited us over for Fourth of July, we were pretty excited.  Our holiday weekend last year was kind of a bust because we spent the whole day in traffic.  This year, we would not make that mistake again, golldarnit!  My husband had the brilliant idea to take the Surfliner train and when he has ideas like that, he gets lots of kisses.  I was so excited!  And we knew we’d be down to the OC in an hour and change rather than somewhere between 2 and 4 hours.

Turns out that horrible traffic jam never happened, and people were getting from here to there in an hour flat (OF COURSE).  But we still had the experience of riding the train, which just makes us seem like fun people.  Right?

Stevie was cool with it for the first 30 minutes, but then it started making regular stops and he thought every stop was his cousins’ house and he’d yell “Getting off now!”  So we’d have to convince him that we were not there yet.  He didn’t really like that… And you know what happens next: we just kept giving him snacks to keep him quiet a little longer.

We arrived at the San Juan Capistrano station and I was in love!  So cute cute cute there.  I might have to make a day trip back to just explore a little more.

Spending time with the cousins was just what we needed.  Stevie was in heaven!  So it gave us to chance to just hang out and not feel stressed about his behavior.  He was so happy and just loved running around the beautiful, enviable backyard (as did I).  We relaxed in the grass, ate good BBQ, enjoyed the perfect weather.  I mean, you can’t ask for much more than that.

On the way home, we were 99.9% sure Stevie would pass out on the train.  But once again, he beat the odds and made it all the way home – just a little wired.  And his no-nap-late-bedtime actually worked out in our favor for the first time ever when he slept until 9am on Sunday.  NINE A.M.  Aaaaahhhhhh.

A good day for this silly little family.