Dan leaves for a business trip this evening to Orlando, Florida, and won’t be back until Thursday evening. I’m a little nervous because this will be the longest I’ll have ever been alone with the Mio, but my mother-in-law will come take care of her on the days I’m at work as usual, and I’ll just have to fly solo with Mio in the evenings when I get off of work, despite my usual exhausted state on such workdays.

We made the best of this long holiday weekend before Dan leaves, though — here is Part I of our eventful Labor Day weekend!

On Saturday, we decided to take a day trip down to Santa Cruz, for Mio’s first time at the beach! We picked up some delicious gourmet sandwiches at The Junket to eat for lunch at the beach, and headed down in the early afternoon. We hit a lot of traffic on the way (to be expected, because of the long weekend) so it took a while to get to Santa Cruz, but we promptly set up spot on the beach as soon as we got there.

 

Mio's first time at the beach
Mio's first time at the beach!

 

Mio loves the beach!
She already loves the beach!

 

fun under the sun
The cutest babe on the beach!

 

Sakura in the same romper, a year ago.(Random coincidence: I realized afterwards that the romper Mio wore that day, which is a hand-me-down from my cousin Yuko’s daughters, is the exact same one that Sakura was wearing exactly a year ago when we visited their family on Labor Day weekend. Except that Mio is 5 months old here, and Sakura was 10 months old at the time. Oh, Mio… you are growing way too fast.)

 

Anyway, back to Santa Cruz: after about an hour, it started getting pretty cloudy. Not quite the perfect day at the beach that we had been anticipating. πŸ™

 

cloudy Santa Cruz

 

Dan feeding Mio
We got Mio all bundled up, as it started to get chilly.

 

Our little spot on the beach.
Our little spot on the beach.

 

Time to leave!
Mio getting grumpy... time to leave!

 

So the trip to the beach started out nice, but it definitely could have been more enjoyable towards the end — hopefully next time, there’ll be more sun and warmer weather! We’re glad that we got to go to the beach before the summer’s over. Since the Bay Area typically experiences Indian summers, I have hope that we still have some warm weeks left before we enter the rainy season….

We also stopped by Buy Buy Baby in San Jose on our way back home, and picked up something we’ve been researching and eyeing for Mio for a while now. But we’ll save the big reveal for another day. πŸ™‚