Vacation!!

Two weeks ago, we took a trip to Cedar City for a family vacation with Bo's family. His parents rented a big house there and we hung out and played together all week. We had a lot of fun...


Here's Naiya--"Look Ma! No Hands!" She was standing up by herself and was pretty happy and kind of surprised by it. :)


The kids totally got addicted to Wii on this trip. They played everyday and Melia and Eden actually got really good at bowling. Wyatt and Alex were a work in progress. Maybe next year's vacation--for getting a handle on Wii...and for deciding they really want to be friends after all. :)


It was so good to see Grandma Adeline again. We missed her and I think she really had fun watching the girls play and interact.


Naiya is soooo close to walking and we thought she might do it during our vacation since she had so many people to practice with. No dice. But actually, she took her first steps today with Bo and I in the living room. She took a good 3 or 4 steps and she could totally do more, but she's still got that mental block going. 16 months old. Just taking her time. :)


We did not slack too much healthwise on this vacation. Caleb brought his P90X workout DVDs and lets just say that many were sore for most of the week.


We had a Family Home Evening outside by the fire pit. Micah did a really good job giving the lesson. Eden just got a splinter in her finger prior to this, thus she's not looking so happy here. Yeah, the house was great, but the outside was not so kid friendly. Lots of dirt and rocks. Out in the middle of nowhere. Reminded me a little of Paradise. :)


The pool at this place turned out to be freezing, so we spent a lot of time in the jacuzzi. That is, until we actually went in it during the day time and realized the water was green.


Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.


So we went to a park to have a picnic and we encountered a real live polygamist family there dressed in long dresses and bonnets and everything!! I don't know why, but I got excited to see this. :) Actually, I'm glad we didn't see this until after we had already moved to Utah and had been here for a month so we got to see that people are normal and cool here. If this would've been the first thing I saw...I might have been a little freaked out.


That night, we went to a Shakespeare festival and they had a fun show for the kids with dancing and singing.


So we planned a nice leisurely day at Zion's National Park to camp out by the water and swim all day long. Well, long story short, this is the closest we got to getting wet.


But we made the best of it.


We took a hike up to the emerald pools. We never actually saw any--emerald, that is.


We stopped for ice cream to cool down on the way home. Naiya loves feeding daddy.


We celebrated August birthdays while we were there. Happy birthday Caleb and Bo!


This is on the top of the "mountain" that the kids hiked up one morning because the one that some of the adults were hiking was a little too big.


Goodbye to Grandma Adeline, Grandma Carol and Grandpa! They left a day earlier than the rest of us.


Bo was really broken up about it.


We had a dance party on our last day there. When parents are away, the kids will play. :)


Naiya got really attached to baby Jake. She wanted to hold him in her lap and pet his head. Every time Tia tried to take him away, she got upset.

We're thankful for a great time and a great family!

When Is Father's Day Again??

Ok, so this is totally late, but I just wanted to give a shout out to Bo for being an awesome father to our girls. They are so blessed to have him and so am I. :) The girls and I went shopping at the Dollar Tree for our Father's Day gifts for daddy and they had a blast! Melia was so excited and kept telling everyone that we were getting presents for Father's Day for her daddy. She went through the store singing a Father's Day song that she made up and saying, "Oh, I think Daddy would like this!" about practically everything she saw. This is what we came up with.


From Naiya, a football to play catch with Daddy. :)


From me, a Sudoku book.


From Melia, beautiful fake flowers. :)


Happy Father's Day! We love you! You're our favorite daddy! :)

Happy Pioneer Day!

In our church, July 24th is Pioneer Day, the day we celebrate the pioneers of our church and everything that they went through to allow us to have what we have today. Anyway, I have never seen it celebrated like they do here in Utah though. It's a pretty big deal here and they have all kinds of events for it. We went to a kind of fair type thing in a big park and they had all kinds of boothes and games and stuff all relating to the early pioneers. It was pretty cool. Side note: When I told Melia it was Pioneer Day and that we were going to a fair she got really excited. She ran and told Bo, "Daddy, Daddy! Happy Pineapple Day!"


So for quite a while now, Melia has been wanting to ride a horse. We had a horse that lived down the street in Paradise and every morning, we would walk by and she would ask me if she could ride it. I would say, "Well, we don't know the people who own him, so we can't ride that horse." And then she would say, "Well, we could knock on their door and ask them what their name is." To her, that would solve the problem of us not knowing them and then we could ride their horse. How do you explain away that logic? Anyway, we tried a couple of times with a friend's horse and at a fair, but she decided they were too big and only wanted to ride a little horse. So when I saw these ponies at the Pioneer Day thing, I knew this was it. I earned a couple of notches on my mom belt by standing in the long line in the hot sun with the tons of other parents and kids while Bo and the girls walked around to look at the other boothes and stuff. Seeing the smile on Melia's face while she rode made it worth it though. :)


Auntie Azie and Grandma Carol went with us and have been a big help to us taking care of the girls through our unpacking process.


The girls got a little tired of looking around the Pioneer museum so Melia decided to entertain Naiya by playing her pioneer "kazoo" that she made earlier.


Later that day, we got together with a bunch of our good friends from So Cal at Alex and Heidi's house for a BBQ. Vero showed up decked out in her pioneer digs in true Veronica style. It took me back to the days when she would show up for church in random wigs, etc. :) It was so good to hang out and catch up with everyone. Even though we hadn't seen them for a long time, we picked right back up where we left off as if we hadn't even been apart. That's the cool thing about great friends.


It was kind of surreal to see all of our mini me's running around playing together. This is a picture of the world's shortest balloon toss competition. One toss and that was it. For all contestants.


We had a great time until the very end. Melia was wearing some dress up shoes and tripped coming down the wooden stairs outside and tumbled all the way down. It really scared us, and her, and we weren't sure if she was really ok until about an hour later at home. She started acting like herself again and we are grateful!