Tiny Vacation to Utah

To our family of homebodies a second vacation in a month is pretty crazy! But I think after the Colorado experience our kids were more used to things being not normal, vacation-style, no-schedule. This Utah trip went really surprisingly well! We did ensure a couple of things happened for the trip to be smooth: non-stop flight Austin-Salt Lake City, and staying with friends who have kids/grandkids, who's houses are child-proof and full of toys/entertainment. On our flight there, our booked three seats turned into four when a lady next to us moved up a row. It was nice for everyone to have a spot and to not be crammed. The kids are small enough to fit into one seat, but the constant quarreling and fighting about things gets annoying really quickly in a small airplane. Ophelia was pretty easy occupied with watching something and coloring/doodling, but Emerson as usual is hard to please. The fingerplays, songs, and bouncing him on my knees worked best to make the time pass, oh, and food, of course. He also enjoyed patting a sleeping gentleman in front of us on the head and standing on the armrest flirting with ladies sitting behind us...

At first we stayed with our wonderful old friends, the Clark family. They have three beautiful very active children, so needless to say our kids had lot of fun there! We took the kids to Temple Square:

Ophelia was working on her picture-taking skills:

I'm not going to post the dozen pictures of the sidewalk that she took, but here are a few of the flowers that were pretty good:

She came up to a random couple sitting by the sidewalk and asked to take a their picture with our camera!!!! And they said "Sure!". She didn't push the button hard enough, so the picture was never actually taken, but good grief...that girl is not shy! And people just can't say no to her!

The beautiful temple:

Ten years ago it was just the two of us on this pedestal taking our wedding pictures, but look at us now, definitely multiplied:

The kids really liked the Christus statue. Emerson enjoyed the acoustics in this room and kept yelling "ECHO!!" at the top of his lungs, so we had to leave pretty quickly to avoid being escorted out:

In the visitor's center Ophelia enjoying pushing all the different buttons and watching all these beautiful videos:

Before we left, we let the kids splash around in these fountains. Emerson got soaked! He loved it until the one straight shot into his face :) I have a great video of that, but I submitted it to America's Funniest Home Videos, so I had to take it down from any "public" websites.

With the crazy vacation schedule, our whole nap routine was out the door, so the kids slept in the rental car a lot. And with all these places to see and things to do, they were wiped out a lot. Also, late bedtime added to them being extra tired during the day. The Clarks live out in Eagle Mountain, so we had a usual drive of one hour one-way if we wanted to go anywhere. PJ and I appreciated quiet car rides though!

Our friend Mash came out to EM with her hubby James and their kids for a bit. Here is their sweet little baby:

Here is the blue-eyed team of our kids and the Clark kids:
                                          

Good times! It was so fun to spend time with those guys! Olya took our family pictures while we were there too. She is an amazing photographer, so I can't wait to see the results!

We went to visit Provo one of the days. This is a the playgroup at Wymount where we used to live the last 2 years of our BYU career. The place looked the same, beautiful and clean, but the playgrounds seemed awfully small! I guess when we had not kids we really couldn't judge that and had nothing to compare to. So many wonderful memories of Provo and our first married years flowed into my head as we were driving around. Ahhh, nostalgie!

Beautiful temple, gorgeous mountains:

Can you spot the Y in the back?

This is where PJ first laid his eye on me! Jamba Juice!

And this is the bench where PJ proposed to me :) The kids weren't as excited about it as we were:

Saturday was the big event for which we made our family trek out to Utah: Aaron and Ada's wedding. It was a beautiful small ceremony at the International Peace Gardens and the reception followed at a nearby park. It was so perfect to have the reception by the playground, and the sandpit. We look like a family of little people compared to the newlyweds over here:

Emerson was just finished eating a batch of sand, so that's why he is shirtless...I was trying to clean his sandy face up!

After the wedding, we headed to our second stop, the Hegji's home, or, as Ophelia kept calling them, the Hedgehogs. So wonderful to have had our kids meet my other set of parents! They are wonderful and so loving. We had an awesome visit with them!

Ophelia knew for a while that her actual birthday will be spent in Salt Lake City, so we kept telling her that we won't have any big parties then, but that we'd celebrate the following weekend. But in reality it turned out that we celebrated a lot that day. In the morning Aaron's Mom put a candle in a doughnut and everyone sang her a happy birthday. (We were in Orem for Aaron's sister's baby blessing.)

To continue her birth day, the Hegji's got Ophelia a beautiful princess cake, which she was most excited to eat, ever since she saw it the night before.

She sure enjoyed that pink frosting:

Our trip to Utah was only five days long, but seemed much linger because we did so many things, saw so many people, visited so many places. While in Orem is stopped to see my good friend from freshman year, Angie and her cute family. It was a short visit, but was so good to see how wonderfully they are doing. Ah, just not enough time for all of our Utah friends... Oh, well...till next time!