Steven's birthday

Steven's 11th birthday was a very full day. We drove in to the city again, parked downtown, and walked to the Giants game.

I think AT&T Park is my favorite baseball stadium. It is so gorgeous on the water. I didn't appreciate it when Ken and I went last year because we had better seats (lower down) and we couldn't see the bay.

The game was a sell out, but not well attended. I'm sure many of the people who bought tickets were like us and made their purchase before the home run record was broken, hoping to catch a bit of baseball history. But we weren't going to miss the game just because Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run 2 days earlier!

These fans were still hoping to fish a home run baseball out of the bay. One ball almost went out into the bay, it landed on the deck just shy of the water. The game in general had so much variety and plays that you don't see very often. To me it was like the players were just having fun now that the pressure of the home run record hanging over them was gone. We saw players on 1st and 3rd simultaneously try to steal a base - the idea being that stealing 2nd would draw the play, allowing home to be stolen. It didn't work: the baseball was sent home, but it was fun to watch. We also saw a bat broken on a hard hit, which I've never seen in real life before. It was so loud!

I thought maybe Barry Bonds wouldn't play at all. He wasn't in the batting order, but he made a showing as a pinch hitter in the 8th inning.

Chloe took this picture of her Dibs she ate at the baseball game and told me she wanted me to put it in my blog. Sometimes my family seems to think that mom's blog is a group project.

After the game we walked around Fisherman's Wharf. Mark Twain said that the coldest winter he ever spent was the summer he lived in San Fransisco.

The kids with Alcatraz in the background.

Each of the girls got to choose an oyster and keep both the shell and the pearl that was found inside. We had the pearls set into pendants to wear as necklaces. The nicest compliment I was ever paid was that I was a *pearl of a girl* and this picture reminds me of that. I'm so lucky to have three daughters! Each of them are pearls.

We had Steven's birthday dinner at Franciscans - a high end seafood restaurant right on the pier. My kids are crazy about seafood thanks to their dad who has spent their entire lives teaching them to enjoy it.

Steven ordered a whole crab just for himself.

After dinner it was getting late, but we couldn't leave without a cable car ride. Chloe had been looking forward to the cable car ride thanks to her book This is San Francisco. I would have had the lady in the picture take a shot of our whole family together instead of me acting as photographer but we'd already had a language barrier argument over her teenage daughter squishing Chloe, so it didn't feel right asking her to take a picture for us considering the conductor sided with me and made her daughter go inside the cable car instead of standing holding on to the outside.

Well, like I said, it was getting late, and the cable car didn't take us very close to where we were parked, so the kids and I waited in the lobby of the Marriott downtown while Ken went and got the car for us. It took him more than 20 minutes even though he wasn't hobbled by the rest of the family and our shorter legs. I can't imagine how long it would have taken if we'd all walked together to the car.

I tried to take a self portrait showing me all tired and gritty from our day, but Steven stood behind the camera and started telling me it was looking good, which made me laugh.

The Neutrogena set up in the hotel bathroom looked so good when we got to the hotel. I washed away all the city grit, and even used the mouthwash (which contained alcohol which is not good for your mouth because it dries the tissues how could Neutrogena go so wrong?) but I didn't care it just felt so good to be tingly and fresh after our big day in the city.