Day # 7 - Colby's Birthday, Going Home, Atascadero Zoo

We had originally planned to go home on Thursday, August 7th, but by Tuesday we were all pretty much done. As gorgeous & relaxing as it was, we had still in mind what was waiting for us back at home. Remember that I had just finished doing daycare, literally, my last day with Baby H was the day before we left for vacation. So we had been in our house for almost a year but had not been in it without daycare kids. So we were looking forward to that. We still had to do some school shopping and get Lacie registered at her new school. David was chomping at the bit to get into his new classroom and get things set up. And we only had a week before school started. So we made the unilateral decision to cut our vacation short by one day. Crazy right? But it definitely worked for us.

So our last morning at the beach house was Wednesday, August 6th, and Colby's 5th birthday!!! We had promised him all week that he would get to go to a ZOO on his special day. The zoo was in Atascadero which is on our way home. We had to clean up and pack up before we could get on the road, and we stopped at Denny's first - his choice - for birthday pancakes :)

This zoo is the tiniest lil zoo I've ever seen LOL. They had well over 100 different species but it was definitely tiny. I mean I think we were done within in a hour? Kind of a bust we thought but Colby LOVED it. He's our lil animal guy. The biggest hits were the HUGE Galopagus tortoises and the Meerkats. They were SO cute! I loved how they laid completely flat and all stretched out hehehe Colby even picked out a stuffed meerkat from the gift shop as his bday present :)




We stopped in Paso Robles so we could do some school shopping at their ginormous Target. FUN times :) Then we finally got on the road for home and everyone but Daddy (the driver) conked out for naps!

We picked up a pizza and cupcakes to take home for Colby's birthday dinner and practically crawled into the house and collapsed. A week's vacation really takes it's tole on a body! We had dinner and sang to the birthday boy and just enjoyed being home!