Utah Part 1- The Tulip Festival

So our next Utah trip, taken just two weeks after the previous one, was about the same length of time as the one before, but for some reason we have a lot more pictures.  So here comes a series of posts!  This trip was for another wedding, for my little brother, Christopher and his beautiful wife Camille.  I was lucky enough to be able to make their wedding cake, so we planned to be up in Utah for the whole week before the wedding to give me time to bake and decorate.  Tim's sister TraceCe was awesome and let us move in with them for week, and completely take over their basement kitchen (and much of the rest of the house).  The setup was perfect.  

But we couldn't spend the whole trip just baking!  So we found lots of other fun things to do.  And we lucked out, because the Tulip Festival was in full force, and it was AWESOME.

 

And if the flower gardens weren't spectacular enough, TraceCe treated us to a glass-blowing experience.  It wasn't blowing glass, per se, but it was super cool.  Tim even got in on the action, and we have two very cool flowers now.

Part 1, complete.  And I definitely recommend the Tulip Festival!!!

Girly-woman + flat tire + no cell service= ...well, you guess

I have several other posts that need to be posted, but before I forget, a story for you!

Sunday night I had to travel the hour+ to go into town for a stake meeting for our girls camp coming up.  I was lucky enough to get to drive in with one of my good friends, who makes the drive remarkably short.  Things were going good, and time was flying.  In fact, we were even going to be early...  when to my surprise, just a short 10 miles out of town, the car started making a strange thrumping noise.  Yes, it was definitely a thrump.  Not one to pay attention to strange noises the car makes (yes, I'm girly-woman through and through), I would normally just keep driving and hope my ignorance won out in the end, but surprisingly, this time I pulled off the road.

(If my comment about having to drive 1 hour+ to get to town didn't clue you in, this road we were driving on is rather... isolated.)

When what to my surprise (this sounds eerily similar to a Christmas poem I know...), but a flat tire appeared (ok, it didn't really appear... but I had high hopes that the thrumping actually meant nothing).  Realizing SOMEBODYwas going to have to do SOMETHING, I started looking for somebody.  Then I realized that somebody was me.

We pulled off the road as far as possible, which wasn't a whole lot, and started unloading tire-changing paraphernalia.  Then we realized that the jack, that is so easily placed under a car by a man, was not screaming at us where is should be put under the car.  So we set that aside, figuring it would probably figure itself out, and we tried to start loosening the lug-nuts on the tire-- which, I can say, in a skirt and sandals is not easily done.  Luckily, it wasn't 5 minutes after pulling over that a nice older man and his wife stopped and offered to help us.

(Have I mentioned yet that we didn't have any cell service?) 

I have no shame in taking help, so we gladly accepted his offer and before we knew it, the jack was under the car, the car was raised, and the tire was off- all before myself and my rider could figure out how to get the spare out of the trunk.  We were DEFINITELY going to make it on time to our meeting.  Our weak muscles couldn't handle the piece locking the tire into the trunk, so we stepped aside for our hero.  Except, he couldn't get it out either.  And 15 minutes later, he still couldn't get the tire out.  Something was wrong.

So we had 3 options:
1.Walk into town-- just 10 miles in a skirt and sandals, in the middle of the desert, at dusk
2. The couple who stopped could drive into town and call someone for us-- except everyone we knew in town was currently at a meeting and not answering phones
3. We could sit on the laps of  our heroes parents in the back of their car, have them drive us into town, and then we could call someone that wasn't answering their phone because they were at the meeting.

I"m not gonna lie, none of those options sounded that great.  So we went with option four: find the strange, ancient bottle of tire-puncture-fixer in the trunk that I had never seen in my life.  Mr. Hero put it in the tire, and with the spray spewing everywhere, and air leaving the tire faster than I could have blown it in, he said, "you better get rolling quickly.  This stuff has to roll around inside the tire to fill the hole." 

I panicked as he lowered the jack.  The tire kept sinking lower and lower-- but not as low as before, so we jumped in the car and started driving.  SOMEHOW, we managed to make it 10 miles into town.  But with it being a Sunday night and all, nobody was open.  Luckily, Walmart was.  Good ol' Walmart.  We pulled in and learned that the auto center was closing in 10 minutes.  Close call or what? The people at Walmart managed to fix the original tire and we made it to our meeting, with 10 minutes left. 

Why tell this story?  Because it was miracle after miracle.  It was super inconvenient to have a flat tire, but there were so many different ways this story could have gone. 

1. It was still light outside when we got the flat.
2. I actually recognized a problem and pulled over before we had a bigger problem.
3. A non-creeper stopped to help.
4. The tire-puncture-fixer, I later learned, was a last minute grab from Tim's parents' shed in Utah.  It is probably older than I am, and Tim was shocked that it even worked.  But it did, and it got us to Walmart
5. We got to Walmart 10 before the auto center closed, and the workers were willing to look at our car quickly
6. The tire was fixable, and I didn't have to buy a new one.

The next morning we had to leave the house at 4:30am to get to the airport.  Had we gotten a flat tire then, instead of the night before, it might have taken hours before anyone passed to stop and help us, and I would have missed my flight. 

Like I said, UBER inconvenient, and I'm bummed we missed our meeting, but things could have turned out so differently.  We are really grateful for the tender mercies we had.

Pure Bliss

 I'm not sure what it is about trampolines, but the girls love them.  And I love watching them jumping, falling, and squealing, because they are the epitome of pure bliss.  There are no giggles like trampoline giggles.  I love it.

Dear Easter Bunny, Please come late!

I just realized NOTHING about Easter was posted here!  And here I am, a month behind-- again.

We're a pretty traditional family so we dyed a dozen hard-boiled eggs for Family Home Evening.  The girls thought this was awesome.  I love that they're still small enough it seems like a new thing every year to them!  All in all, very successful.  Lydia pretty much just dyed the same egg over and over again.  She definitely had a monopoly on the pink.  But you know, I think her egg was my favorite at the end of the night!  The dipping and re-dipping and dipping again gave it a beautiful color! 

 And sadly, as with many holidays, Tim had to work on Easter Sunday.  Something about everyone liking to be with their families and out boating that day....  So the girls and I wrote a note to the Easter Bunny.  We knew that Daddy would be sad if he wasn't there when the Easter Bunny left goodies... and frankly, Lydia, Brooklyn, and I were NOT down with the idea of a questionable bunny leaving treats without someone here to protect us. 

 
But to get ourselves prepared, and in the Easter-egg-hunting mood, I created what I think, is the best game EVER.  I took a pack of glow sticks, broke them, stuffed them in easter eggs and hid them around the house.  Then we turned off the lights and the girls went looking.  It. Was. AWESOME.  Seriously, something you should try.  We will probably be making a tradition of this one.  And the best part was that I only had to do 12 eggs.  Then the girls just kept hiding and re-hiding them for each other.

So even though the Easter Bunny didn't come Easter morning (thanks to our handy sidewalk-chalk note), the girls still wore their Easter dresses to church.  But before you send your "ooohs" and "awwws" my direction, this is all thanks to Grandma Heaton.  These dresses were actually made for Uncle Christopher and Aunt Camille's wedding which would happen a few weeks later, but they doubled as Easter dresses, and they were a hit! Talk about feeling like a princess.

Luckily, Daddy made it home late Easter Sunday night, just in time for the Easter Bunny to apparently dump EVERYTHING he had leftover from his other house visits. 

If I'm being completely honest, it was really hard to celebrate the Easter Bunny part of Easter the day after the actual holiday.  I don't know why.  I know it shouldn't matter.  But for some reason it did.  But in hindsight, I guess it might not be a bad idea to let Easter Sunday be about the true meaning of Easter, and leave the Bunny for the next day. 

I Love to See the Temple

As you know from the last post, we were in Salt Lake.  And I totally could have posted this picture on that last post, but felt like it deserved it's own post.  Because this screams "I love to see the temple" to me.  In fact, I might have it framed with the wording.  This is one of Brooklyn's favorite songs, and she is forever asking "can I go inside too?!"  Someday Brooklyn :)

"I love to see the temple, I'm going there someday!"

A Hop, Skip, and A Jump Away= just 10 hours

Several weeks ago we were able to head up north, just 10 hours or so, to see family and be in the temple while Tim's first nephew was sealed to his beautiful wife.

We were lucky enough to be able to spend a whole week up there, and we found lots to do.  Visiting family, checking out the Hogle Zoo, playing with cousins, shopping, showing the girls Temple Square (because how could we miss out on the "pointy temple"?), and swimming at the hotel pool.  Not to mention the amazing sealing and reception.

We're lucky to have such great family that let us pop in whenever, and stay for days.  They also feed us (well, I might add), entertain us, and displace their children to give us a bed.  If you aren't a member of the Shurtliff family, you're missing out.

Here are a few of my favorites from that week.

Is this amazing or what? The animals at this zoo are so close you could touch them (if it weren't for the 6-inch thick glass wall of course).  This tiger and gorilla were RIGHT there!!!

Swimming at the hotel pool was definitely a highlight for the girls

Temple Square was awesome

Photo Booth

I've been seeing more and more "photo-booths" for party ideas, activities, and even wedding receptions.  And most of them aren't even with fancy backgrounds or cameras.  This is great.  Because even I can do it!

So that's not why these pictures were taken.  I just found them on my picassa program and realized how cute they were.  And figured... the world should see these.  But it did make me think, I should do a photo-booth for something.  Because why not?  It's fun.

The girls thought posing for pictures while I wouldn't move from the couch was awesome (yes, sheer laziness on a Sunday afternoon). They got a kick out of posing, and then checking out their pictures.  Giggles galore-- it was lots of fun.

 

 

I totally did not mean to give Brooklyn horns in this picture....