Wisconsin or Bust: Sunday

Even though we had a late night, we wanted to catch a 9:00 church session so we could spend the rest of the day visiting. Everyone was pretty tired and it took longer than it should have to roll out of bed. We were a little late for church and walked in during the opening hymn. It was an older building with an ornate covering for the organ pipes and chandeliers for lighting. It was a nice meeting and the topic of the day was "Finding Peace in a Turbulent World".

After church, we went back to the hotel to change clothes and headed up to visit John's brother Jim's family before they had to go to church at 1:00. We had a nice lunch with them, and after lunch they left for church and we headed up Emigration Canyon to see the This Is The Place Monument. We were so busy visiting and chatting that I completely forgot to take any pictures of the cousins together!

I remember going up there as a kid for a 4th of July picnic, and I just remember the big monument there. Now there's a bunch of statues and some kind of pioneer village park. Anyway, we didn't have a lot of time, so we found the name of our ancestor's handcart company on the handcart monument, and read most of the plaques, and then headed off.

The monument from the pioneer side. On the front and up top are pioneer statues/friezes, on the left side are statues of the trapper/trader explorers and on the right are statues of the Spanish explorers. Brigham Young is in the middle up top, with Heber C. Kimball and Wilford Woodruff on his right and left, respectively.

The handcart monument.

We went to visit Grandma and had a nice visit with her, chatting and looking at pictures. I brought my computer and showed her pictures of the kids and their cousins and videos of their piano recital performances. She was impressed. She was my piano teacher, so I hoped she'd be pleased with how well they all three play. She was.

My cousin Robert brought her that purple scarf from Afghanistan, and she brought it out to show us. I tried to put it on her like a headscarf, but didn't have bobby pins, so she ended up looking, as she said, "like an old shepherd".

Serious Picture

Goofy Picture

After our visit, we went back up to visit Jim's family and had dinner with them and played Giant Spoons (it's like regular spoons, except with giant plastic spoons), which is one of our favorite games we play with them. I still can't believe I didn't take any pictures.

The kids spent the night with their cousins, as they love to do when we visit, and John and I went back and got ready for the next day.

So much for Sunday being a day of rest!

Apologies

I'm sorry for falling behind, but we've been traveling though no service zones and getting in late at night.

Thanks for keeping up with us, we'll get caught up as soon as we can.

I may not even be able to post this!

Wisconsin or Bust: Saturday

We were able to get on the road Friday evening, and spent the night in Reno. We thought we had a good plan in place to make it to Provo in time to check in to the hotel, change clothes and be on time for my brother Critter's play, but we forgot that we'd be losing an hour when we crossed into the Mountain time zone.

By the time we got to Elko, NV, we realized that we might not make it in time, especially considering that I-80 was supposedly under construction and down to one lane. There were cones, the road was half closed, but we didn't see anything that looked like construction going on. It just looked like there were cones in the middle of the road.

John did a fine job of driving and we made it in time to check in to the hotel and discovered that we were a block away from the theater, and were able to walk there. When John checked in, he was upgraded to a suite. It's pretty fancy, it's a Parlor Suite at the Provo Marriott Hotel.

This is a picture of our type of suite from the hotel website (they probably have one on each floor). You can see the living room and the doors to the bedroom, and some of the great view of the mountains. Behind the photographer is a kitchenette, and there's a walk-in closet in the bedroom with a large bathroom with a separate shower and tub. Fancy.

Critter was performing in a show called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), which claims to perform all of Shakespeare's works in 90 minutes with a cast of three. Three men.

While there were some parts that were not entirely appropriate for children (most of it went over the heads of the youngest two), we mostly laughed our butts off. Critter was hilarious, as always.

Here are the kids out in front of the theater:

While we were waiting for the ladies at the front desk to find our online ticket purchase, I was surprised to see my cousin Rebecca and her new husband Sam walk in! Later, my sister Stephanie and her husband Bryan joined us, but we knew they would be there.

After the show, we got a tour of the theater and then we all went to Los Hermanos for a rather late dinner. Most of us went back to our hotel to hang out and chat for a while. Becca and Sam had to go, as Sam had just driven back from Texas and was tired.

Front row: Ruby, Sam, Meghan, Steffy, Becca

Back row: Me, John, Bryan, Critter, other Sam

Eventually, Steffy, Bryan and Critter had to go and the kids needed to get to bed, so we said good-night and turned in.

Meghan's Travel Companions

Meghan likes to sit in the back row by herself in our trips. There's an AC plug back there and she can play on her phone without the charge running out.

This trip she has to share her seat with my fig tree and a pothos houseplant.

The fig tree is a little droopy. It's under some stress. We were planning to just grab it and toss it into the car, but its roots had punched through the pot and gone into the ground (which explains why it was getting so big). We had to repot it just as we were leaving. It's not doing too well, and we'll probably lose a lot of the top. It's a tough little tree and it may lose some branches but will come back in the end.

Off we go!

This afternoon the moving van drove off with all of our stuff and headed off for Wisconsin. We have too much stuff.

And now we're on the road!

We had a fun day playing in the one cleaned out room with the twins, who will be dearly missed, along with their parents. It was definitely a teary good-bye. I sure do love those little guys. Sniff.

This has been a whirlwind week filled with friends visiting, swimming, having us over, sharing hugs and tears, bringing meals and showering us with love. Some days we had people in and out all day long!

There are so many things we will miss in California, especially the fresh produce! I don't know what I'm going to eat all winter.

We'll figure it out.

Here we go!

Some Days All You Can Do Is Shake Your Head

I let my children dress themselves. It takes a really big fashion disaster for me to step in. I just don't care that much.

So, this morning when Ruby came out with a skort, white tights, hiking-style sneakers and a white tee shirt with pink long johns underneath it all (to keep warm, she said), I said nothing.

Imagine my surprise, when I picked her up from the after school program, to find her running around in just the long johns. Just the long johns.

My daughter was essentially running around in her underwear. At school.

She said she got hot. I pointed her state of semi-dress to the teachers and they all thought she was wearing leggings and a matching shirt.

Sigh. What can you do? We all had a giggle.

Maybe I'll be a little more involved in the future. But probably not.

New Toys

We've been planning to upgrade our phones for a while and had been researching and deciding what to do, what phones to get, which company to go with, when John came home from a business trip with two iPhone 4S phones. What's more fun than a husband who brings presents home from a business trip? Probably a husband that doesn't travel. But I'll take the 4S as a consolation prize.

We've had lots of fun playing with Siri, the voice recognition software that does all sorts of stuff for you. And downloading apps. I'm writing this post using the Google Blogger app. Great fun.

Anyway. New phones. Lots of fun. Maybe even more blog posts in my future? We'll see.