Visiting the Gassend Family: Day 1

On October 18th the Carstens' Family took a vacation to visit the Gassend Family. :-)

Nate's college roommates (from MIT) currently live in San Carlos, CA. Ever since I've known Nate we've tried to get together about every few years to catch up and meet the newest members of our growing families. As the Gassends, with their son Jonathan, came to visit us Thanksgiving of 2010 we were overdue for our visit down to see them. 

It's amazing how traveling with kids changes the older they get. We took a trip to Florida when Abby was nine months old and she basically slept every time we were on a plane and then was happy to sit and play with her doll or crawl around in a small area when we were in the airport waiting. This time Abby could run! We planned to leave (super) early Thursday morning to give us all day Thursday visiting, but this meant getting up Abby at 4am to get to the airport on time. I thought she might have a little bit of running around and then would crash on the plane ride down. Not our little girl. She was so excited to see all the people all that was going on that she didn't sleep a wink on the plane. (And since she'd gotten up for a 1am feeding the night before she was really short on sleep.)

Abby playing in the Pasco airport.

When we arrived in San Francisco, Blaise was there bright and early to pick us up. We kept trying to tell him that we were very happy to rent a car and not bother him, but his helped turned out to be very nice as traffic wasn't the best that morning and a main bridge would be closing down for the weekend. When we got to the house we began to catch up with the rest of the crew: Valerie, Jonathan, and Sophie. After breakfast and chit-chat we headed to the park to let the kids run their wiggles out.

Nate helps Abby down the big-girl slide while Valerie and Sophie watch.

Yeah, Abby!

Blaise finding a quiet moment in the craziness.

Abby has discovered water fountains and loves to take drinks from them. We're still working on not putting our mouth on the spigot when we drink. 

Sophie didn't want to be left behind, so she came for a drink as well.

Abby and Jonathan playing in the tunnel.

The girls swinging!

The first day we didn't too much else besides the park as Nate, Abby, and I were pretty tired from the early morning. Abby got in a little bit of a nap but definitely not enough to make up for her lack of night's sleep. Sophie was also fighting a cold so she tuckered out pretty early as well. Once all the kids were down to sleep we adult spent a little bit of time talking then we also followed the kids to bed. Our first day together was a success and we were looking forward to doing more catching up and seeing how similar/dissimilar Abby and Sophie were. They are eight days apart (Abby was born on Feb. 10th and Sophie on the 18th) but Sophie has an older brother and goes to daycare so there's enough differences in day-to-day life that I was curious to see how that reflected in their abilities and attitudes. So far they're pretty similar. :-)