Favorite Uncle

On my trip to San Diego, I was appointed favorite uncle (on my family side) for my newest nephew. (I suppose that this appointment was primarily based on my being the first uncle to see him, but I think it was my gentle touch and reassuring voice that put me over the top.)

He looks a lot like his older brother, who is doing well as well.

Our time together was unfortunately shortened by the San Diego fires, which I never actually saw, but heard about on the local news reports. There was a period from 11:30 to 4 pm on one of the conference days that was scheduled in the conference for a break. So my brother had planned to drive down from LA to pick me up and go over to La Jolla to see the aquarium at the Scripps Institute and then to hit the beach at La Jolla shores. He called at 12 pm to say they were running a bit late and were about 50 miles away. Then I waited and waited and around 1 pm they called to say they had moved 3 miles from where they had been previously. It turns out that I-5 had been closed down to fight the Camp Pendleton fire. So they didn't make it to San Diego until 2 pm. But we still went anyway.

Hopefully I can post some pictures of the aquarium and of the beach. The Birch aquarium is quite small, but it did have two nice tanks with small sharks. Nephew M (4 yo) was more obessed with cranking the arm on the penny smashing machine than on seeing the fish. We also had a good time at the discovery area were you used blocks and things to change the river channel, then float small toy boat down i to see what happens.

Although time was running out, we took a quick visit to the beach. Unfortunately, due to my overeagerness to hit the nearest section of beach, we landed on a portion of the beach that turned out not to have any bathhouses, so we just had to get wet in whatever we were wearing. But it was lots of fun to go body surfing in the waves and I would recommend La Jolla beach over Mission Beach.