Game day

We've had a phenomenal rest of our trip to southern California! (Note to self: Meh says I completely overused the word 'lovely' in the last post, so I won't use it at all in this one. Well, except in this note.) Zachary did wonderfully, other than having trouble sleeping in a strange place, which one might expect I suppose. But even with this issue, when we moved from hotel to generously offered guest house for this last night, he seems to be doing much much better.

Saturday was a jam-packed day for the little man. After another somewhat sleepless night (perhaps a bit better than the first night?) was compensated somewhat by a very tasty breakfast at our inn, we checked out and headed out for our first meet-and-greet of the day. This was very exciting -- several months ago I'd mentioned that we'd discovered the existence of another young Zachary Selfon living on the east coast. Since then, my research has turned up a rather large family tree, with more than 130 of us around the country and world. An aunt of the other Zachary lives in LA, and we were finally able to get together and meet up for, er, second breakfast (one can never have too many breakfasts!) in Venice. It was so nice to finally get to meet newly discovered family (based on my best guess, a fourth cousin once removed and her husband), and we all had a really nice time sitting at a cafe and chatting.

On the way to our lunch, since we had a little extra time to kill, we decided to hit Surfas, a giant commercial kitchen supply store that was on the way. (I had at first thought the name was just a smooth and stylish commentary on the fact that food preparation requires surfaces. But no, it's actually the founder's name.) Zachary of course chose the opportunity to dirty a diaper, so we had to retreat to the car for a diaper change, and then Meh was mortified when we snuck back to the store with dirty diaper in hand looking for a garbage can. Thankfully, there was an inconspicuous one outside. Anyway, the store itself was a phenomenal collection of anything you could want for a restaurant or for pastry decorating (the latter being one of Meh's favorites). We saw tons of specially shaped pastry bag tips; cutlery/plates/measuring utensils of all sizes and materials; food coloring, nonpareils [those tiny decorative sugar balls], and glitter of all colors of the spectrum (Meh had to get some edible sparkly purple glitter and pink nonpareils); and even baby-shower themed decorettes [fancy sprinkles] with duckies and rattles (Meh got some excellent dinosaur-shaped ones).

Then it was on to lunch (hm, third meal of the day already?) with a bunch of friends, generously hosted by our friend E. We spent a nice relaxing afternoon catching up, chatting, and enjoying tasty food. After a brief visit back to friends T, S, M, and M's house, we headed onward to friend J's birthday party/game night - a fun evening of Cranium, Trivial Pursuit, and Boulderdash, with organized teams, a big scoreboard, and everything! Zachary was again very happy the whole time - Meh reported he was just looking around and smiling during her Trivial Pursuit game (yes, Meh and I were split into separate teams, likely so she could kick my butt, though we never ended up duelling). During my Cranium game, he was getting very tired, so any celebratory noises startled him into crying and I had to run out to a quiet room to soothe him back down. We bailed soon after round two, with Meh's team in the hunt at 1-1 and my team already likely out of contention at 0-2.

For our last stop of the evening, we headed to the beautiful home of Meh's elementary school friend's parents. We'd originally intended to stay with the friend herself, but she and her two sons had unfortunately gotten ill over the past few days and didn't want Zachary exposed to anything, so to the guest house we went! Zachary thankfully fell asleep quite quickly, we'll see how he fares this round...