Life in a Nutshell

I give up, I've been sitting around sick all day and finally decided to get around to updating my blog. J only has two weeks left of his sabbatical :( I'm going to miss having him here to drive the kids everywhere while I nap in the afternoon. What a lazy sucker I am.

No sabbatical would be complete without some type of extensive vacation so we decided to piggyback a trip on my brother's wedding. A week and half beforehand we headed down to Utah for a whirlwind trip to visit as many relatives as possible in 1 week. We headed down on Wednesday, September 1st to Bountiful for our first stop. Every time we make a trip without a tire blowing out (or a car-topper blowing open) I'm grateful now. G&G Morgan had quite a few big diggers next to their house for the water storage tank in construction. We snuck over and had fun taking some pictures.

Thursday afternoon we drove back up to Brigham City to meet my dad for dinner at Maddox's. The rolls alone were worth the drive. It was fun to hang out with dad and talk without a million people around.

Friday evening we headed down to Sandy for our next visit. On the way we dropped by my grandparents. I can't have a visit to Utah without seeing them. I have too many good memories from that house and love them so much.

We had a lot of fun hanging out with Aunt A and Uncle J in Sandy. They are both such big crackups. My parents were up at the cabin that weekend so we had fun torturing cats and leaving toys laying around.

Saturday was a whirlwind day of fruitlessly searching for green dresses for the wedding. The first store I went to had some, but I wasn't willing to pay their prices until I had shopped everywhere else I could think of for 6 straight hours. Talk about frustrating. Luckily I already had something green for myself. Amazing how every retail store can follow the exact same fashion color trends and totally leave out a big color like green.

We were going to get up early Sunday morning to head down to Phoenix, but I couldn't stand the idea of waking up early so we left at a pretty normal morning hour. We took the Glen Canyon Dam route so I was grateful to survive all the highways with no barricade separating us from oncoming traffic. I coped by letting J drive while I read a book. Once we hit Phoenix there was a pretty cool thunderstorm to the east. Once Fefe noticed it she kept saying "Mom, mom!" and as soon as I would turn around she would point out her window and babble something incomprehensible. I don't know how many times she did that.

It was really fun to see Uncle I and Aunt S's house. The kids couldn't get enough of their little toy area under the stairs. I should have gotten a picture of that. We tried to avoid spending too much time outside because it was still way too hot there, but at one point we went to a park so the kids could throw around frisbees. We kept pouring water over the kid's heads to keep them cooled down. It is truly amazing that that many people can live in an area that inhospitable. That night Uncle I made tikki masala for us. It was so good!

I'm going to break off the post here for the more involved parts of our trip.