Santa Monica Day 1

We had a great time in Santa Monica even though it was a little cold and cloudy. Our hotel was right across the street from the Santa Monica pier which made it nice and convenient!

This funny sculpture was on the pier.  It is totally Sophia's favorite food in the world so we had to get a picture with it!

Despite the fact that it was really cold and the water was freezing Sophia couldn't resist getting in.

The rest of us preferred to watch from the shore.

After we decided it was too cold to be on the beach we went to find some other things to do.  The first place we headed to was the LA temple.

It was fun to see it all decorated for Christmas.

We spent some time in the visitors center and saw some cute videos.  After that we enjoyed their miniature sculpture garden for a little while.  We took a picture of this one for Grandma Wilkins.

After the temple we went to the California Science Center.  It was huge and awesome and the best part is that it was free!  We spent almost 5 hours there and the girls loved every minute of it. 

The only downside was that there was tons of school groups there which made things a little crowded (until about 3 pm and then we pretty much had the place to ourselves).  They did have these nice little "discover area" on each floor that was for kids 7 and under.  They were nice and quiet and were great to retreat too when the rest of the museum was too much to handle.  Here's the girls doing s puppet show in one of those areas.

And here they are at the ice wall and riding a snowmobile in the exhibit about polar regions.

This was a cool little movie that had a 50 foot animatronic woman that talked about how the homeostasis works.

This was Sophia's favorite part of the whole museum.  There was a little island in the middle and you were supposed to try and get all these ping pong balls to it. There was all sorts of mechanisms to use on the outside (a crane, a paddle to flip them in their, shooting them with air) to get them to the middle.  Sophia seriously loved it.  She stayed there forever!

The section about ecosystems was really cool.  This living kelp forest was part of it.  It was pretty cool to walk through.

This was in one of the other discovery areas.  It was the cutest little play kitchen.  It's kind of hard to see but the cupboard below the sink behind Lilly was actually a display case with cockroaches in it.  It was kind of cute though because it totally looked like underneath the sink complete with cans of Comet and everything.  There was also another cupboard/display case that had mice in it. It was kind of cute.

The girls also loved playing in the little garden area outside.

After we left the museum we stopped at a little Rose Garden outside. 

The girls each took a picture by their favorite rose bush.

At the pretty fountain in the garden.

Mabel stopping to smell the roses.

This was Sophia's very favorite rose so we had to take picture of it.

The museum was right next to the stadium where USC plays (I think).

That night we went to Tito's Tacos that was recommended to us by one of Doug's friends. They were pretty darn tasty!