Our homeschool "not-back-to-school" party drew a pretty small crowd this year, perhaps in part because of how "chilly" it's been. The little hint of autumn didn't stop us from enjoying the pool, however! It was good to see so many of our friends—and to get to meet a few new families.
On the way up to the airport on Tuesday my mom and I stopped at the Orem Public Library to say goodbye to Josie (who works there). She took us through the new art gallery where I got to see an installation by my friend (?) acquaintance (?) tutor (?) colleague (?) AshMae (who taught the "Mine to Tell" course I took years ago, who I've visited with at BCC events, who I'm friends with on Facebook but don't truthfully know that well in real life). The theme of her exhibit was stay-at-home parenthood.
As I mentioned, I had a few pictures of our museum trip that I was expecting to come from other cameras, and now they're here!
Here's Rosie trying to balance both of her daughters while eating lunch:
My children would love to have a good climbing tree in our yard, but we don't have one. The trees that would otherwise be good to climb have such a high canopy that their branches are truly unreachable. Loblolly pines, for example, easily surpass 100 feet in height and their branches usually crowd up near the top of the tree, leaving most of the trunk bare.
Trees grow upwards from their top, which means that their branches should stay wherever they first sprouted (and in fact they do), but they're often dropped as the tree gets taller. And in the case of the loblolly pines I've seen this is definitely true. All the branches are way up there. So you really can't climb them very easily.
Tulip poplars are another tree that—at least around these parts—grow impressively tall and seem to shed their lower branches.
Honestly, all the trees—maple, oak, whatever. They are all tall, tall tall.
Finding good climbing trees can be hard around here! When I was young, I don't remember it being so difficult. Perhaps trees just grow...shorter...where it's cold and snowy a good portion of the year.
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| Nancy (center) with Kelline (right) and...either David or Abra (left (there's an ongoing family disagreement about whom)) |
Uncle Rod has a lovely piece on exhibition at the Springville Museum of Art, so visiting the museum was on our list of things we had to do while in Utah. We unfortunately didn't get to see Uncle Rod in person, but it was fun to see his photograph.
First, I should warn you that there are a million pictures from our short stop in Goblin Valley. And although Goblin Valley is a whole lot of fun to visit...there's not really a big variety of things to do there. You just kind of...run around in the desert...and climb on hoodoos and things.
This means that pictures will very likely outweigh my text. This happens routinely with my Goblin Valley posts.
Even though Goblin Valley is an interesting place to hike around and explore it's apparently not a very interesting place to write about—I believe I ran into the same problem while discussing Goblin Valley last year [when I said "the trip could be summed up as: we climbed on rocks—a lot"].
In short, we climbed on things, we jumped off of things, we played in the dirt, and we got hot and sweaty.
This year was no exception. We hiked around. We climbed on things. We had a blast. And...yup.
There are, however, a few important stories to share...
The drive to the Aquarium was pretty smooth. Even though it was our first "long" drive all being crammed into our van together, there wasn't very much fighting, and Phoebe was pretty good. We got there a little earlier than Naanii, Bumpa, and Josie, so we were walking around the outside, which had an interesting structure, a surplus stage from a U2 concert that the Aquarium bought.
Me and Ben went to Antelope Island with Auntie K because two certain somebodies thought it would be funny to make me and Alex stand on a fake geyser at the playground at the zoo.😒😒
[Mom edit: That was me and Dad. We thought it would be funny to tell Alexander and Zoë to stand on the fake geyser at the splash pad because they were being mopey-dopes. So they did stand on the geyser and it was kind of funny when the geyser went off...but, boy, were they mad!]
Alex couldn’t go in Auntie K’s car, because his car seat was hard to move, so Ben took his place. My car seat was easy to move, because it’s a Mi-Fold, so I went in Auntie K’s car too.
[Mom edit: I'm not sure that this excursion was specifically to make up for getting the kids wet. I think it was more simply because Auntie K wanted to spend more time with those two. Below is a picture of them hanging out of the sunroof of her car after Zoë's baptism (the car was not moving at the time). They're just at the perfect age where they can have a lot of fun (aren't moody teens) and can buckle their own seatbelts and things (aren't toddlers).]
On our last evening in Utah, we went to my parents' house for a little pre-birthday celebration (since my birthday would be happening somewhere in South Dakota). Kelli picked up some cupcakes from a place called The Sweet Tooth Fairy (or something like that, I think). She got an assortment of cupcakes, including some individually-wrapped gluten-free cupcakes for herself.
They were very yummy!
My mom had the brilliant idea to take a group picture at the start of the evening—when everyone was (1) present and accounted for, and (2) relatively happy. My dad has a tendency to get peopled-out and sneak away, but we wanted to make sure he was there for the pictures. And goodbyes can get ugly and weepy. A third benefit was that we wouldn't end up forgetting to take them!
It's possible that my sister Kelline was the most excited person to have our family visit Utah. She must have driven down from Layton a handful of times! She came to Zoë's baptism, she came for "museum day," she came to the Heiss gathering, she drove Benjamin and Zoë back after their post-zoo excursion, she drove down to deliver birthday cupcakes and say goodbye—by my calculations, that's a handful of times! It's at least an hour one way, so that was quite a lot of driving that she did for us, not to mention all the fun things she planned for us to do!
On Monday she ended up having a couple of her grandkids for the day (long story*), so she invited us to visit some of BYU's museums with them. We ended up being late (which is quite the feat considering we were staying only 15–20 minutes away and my sister had to drive an hour), so they already enjoyed the Museum of Peoples and Cultures without us. We met them at the Museum of Paleontology.
Here are pictures of my four youngest kids:
We stayed at Aunt Linda and Uncle Trevor's house in Spanish Fork while we were in Utah. This allowed the kids to get together with their old friends (specifically Rachel, but also—though to a lesser degree—Miriam, Benjamin, and Zoë) and for us to visit our old stomping grounds.
One evening we took the kids on our old "loop" walk, where we looked for goatheads, sunflowers, thistles, and darkling beetles. We really struck out on the plants (though we weren't very sad about missing out on goatheads) but the darkling beetles were out in full force.
Benjamin bravely picked one up:
On June 14th, we planned to have a family gathering outside at the neighborhood park after a brief organ recital at the church. Unfortunately, that day it decided to rain at the exact time we’d planned to have it (it was quite stormy the whole time we were in Utah, which was strange). This complicated our plans. We hadn’t reserved the gym in the church, but we decided we’d try to gather there anyway and leave if anyone else needed it right then, which was unlikely.
While we waited for people to show up, we played duck duck goose, Simon Says, and parachute games with the kids (resulting in only minimal tears!). It took some of them a while to actually understand how Simon Says works; when Ben was it we told him that he had to try to get people out and he gasped and went, “But why would I want to trick them?!” I think all the little cousins had a lot of fun together, though!
After our Carlsbad adventure, we realized that we would not make it to the hotel in time for dinner. We would make it there around 11:30 pm, and we were still slightly jet-lagged from crossing over time zones, so it would feel like 2:30 am, so we decided to find a McDonalds somewhere. We chose Gallup, NM, as our stopping place.
[Mom edit: That may have been a mistake.]
We had to stop at a gas station in Albuquerque, because Phoebe was being a pill, but while we were there, it started getting really windy. Like really windy. So all of us rushed back to the cars, and tried to get on the freeway as quickly as possible. It started pouring almost right as we got onto the freeway, and the lightning was crazy. We didn't hear any thunder, because the rain was too loud.
Also because it wasn't just rain hitting the car, there was also hail. The hail didn't last very long, but it was very loud. It kept raining for a long time, and only lessened about 30 minutes before Gallup. This was a very big storm that stretched across almost all of New Mexico, and it hit Gallup as well, and so everything was still very wet when we got there.
While Dad and Grandpa were inside getting our food, we were all huddled in our car as it was about 50 degrees outside, and still sort of sprinkling. But we saw a rainbow outside, and had to get out to see it!
Zoë chose to be baptized in Utah so that she could have family members attend, which I think was an excellent decision! It was lovely to have family witness her special day.
