2015 Family (Stay at Home) Vacation

We've been planning for over a year to go on vacation to the beach. But then Steve's car broke, again. So we downgraded to a stay-at-home variety, but to keep with the theme, we did a "Ladybug Girl at the Beach" staycation.

Steve took Thursday off work, but we didn't want to take Emilia out of school for two days during her first full week of school. So Thursday morning, Steve looked for cars. Then, after Emilia got out of school, and Cecily woke up from her nap, we planned on going to a place called "Sandy Beach" right here in Springville. But Cecily got a late start to her nap, and I had a bunch of running around to do that afternoon, and Steve had a backache from driving all over the place. So we postponed the beach part until Saturday and instead, we went out for burgers & fries, then went to Nickel City and all the girls got to pick out treasures (prizes), then went to Farr's Fresh Ice Cream and gorged ourselves on sugary milky goodness.

Friday, Steve let me sleep in, and when I got up we watched Home. Have any of you watched it? It was awesome! Witty, and touching, and laugh out loud. Emilia and I cried at the end. Then after Cecily's nap, we went to 7 Peaks (a local water park with a wave pool, tons of water slides, two kids areas, and a lazy river) for 4 hours and had a blast wearing ourselves out in the water. We played in the waves of the wave pool and Emilia even tried one of the big waterslides, so she faced a fear, just like Lulu. I didn't take any pictures of these festivities because I wanted my phone to still work at the end of the day.

Saturday, Steve was going to buy a car in the morning, but once he had a mechanic look at it, we changed our minds. While he was gone, I got the kitchen floor mopped, and Emilia had a soccer game. Once again, after Cecily's nap, we headed to "Sandy Beach," which is a beach off Utah Lake that is very sandy, but the best part is that the water is warm, and it's only about a foot or two deep for a good hundred yards out into the lake. After Cecily's mad dash after the duck last week, it was good to know she wouldn't sink into a drop off when we turned our heads. We built a fire, roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, searched for seashells--Emilia found another live clam, but didn't want to take it home this time--and made footprints in the sand.

Best vacation we've ever had as a family, hands down. No stress, no packing, no trying to sleep five of us in the same room. Except for the lack of tide pools and real seashells, I'd say this vacation was better than any California beach vacation we could have taken. Wahoo!

Oh, and did I mention that the sunset was amazing? It was. And I took lots of pictures.

The Monday before our vacation, Mira was feeling sad that Emilia has started school and she hadn't. So I took her and Cecily to the Bean Museum. They wanted pictures with all of the statues outside.

One more random pic for you. Mira told me she had ear plugs in. They were really just puffballs. Goofball.

Little happy moments

It was a rough week with lots of happy points thrown in here and there. The girls were all kind of cranky this week.

For example, I posted this on Facebook about how our Saturday night went: Today was good, until this evening, when two children wailed that I had made something as awful as cashew chicken for dinner, one threw her bowl on the floor in protest and was sentenced to her room--from which position she yelled at us until she consented to come pick the food up off the floor and eat it (yeah, I'm mean and unsanitary like that)--one put My Little Pony stickers all over my white shelving, one put all the cat food into the cat water, then opened a water bottle onto the livingroom carpet, one got out of bed 4 times (the last one being at 10pm when her throat hurt so bad, she couldn't possibly sleep until she had a Halls), and the cat got locked in the bathroom because she kept attacking the children. The evening got better again when my husband went to the store and bought Burnt Almond Fudge ice cream, of which I ate a large bowl. Upon finishing said bowl, I decided I probably made it feel bad because I hadn't been very "in the moment" with it, so I tried again. Much better.

Emilia started school on Wednesday morning, so Steve gave the girls father's blessings on Tuesday night. Mira starts preschool a week from Wednesday and she is super excited. I'm excited, too. I think it will be good for her to get away from me for a while. And it will be good for her to have another authority figure tell her 'no.' At least that's what I'm hoping. Here are some of the high points: Cecily and Mira found some stickers one morning. Mira decided to use them to 'decorate' Cecily. She has some on her cheeks, arms, and neck. They were both excited about these decorations.

Another morning, I was working on my laptop in bed when Mira came in to tell me something. She spotted this guy out the window. That's a three point buck about 10 feet from the window. She then mentioned another deer, which I couldn't see from my vantage point.

Getting up, I saw this guy. He is a six-pointer, I think. Hunting season anyone?

Friday night, we were going to go to the library as a family, but we didn't realize that the library closes early on Friday -- 6pm! So we had to change plans. We ended up going to the new Springville Reservoir again. This time I had my phone and took pictures. The sunset was amazing! And we all had fun splashing and building.

At one point, Cecily saw a duck and decided to run after it. I thought this was cute until the duck ran into the water and Cecily kept right on going. She would have drowned herself if she hadn't tripped on a rock about a foot into the water and dunked herself in the freezing mountain water. After that, she only had a diaper on.

Emilia built a river. The fact that the water ran down in a rush was a proud accomplishment for her.

Mira mostly project hopped. Sometimes literally.

Steve built a castle. Which Cecily tried to destroy so many times, we had to build a couple for her to smash and throw into the reservoir.

I built a kitty in an attempt to show the girls, they didn't just have to make castles with sand.

Saturday morning, Emilia had her first soccer game. Steve yelled himself hoarse and Grandpa Watts was quite enthusiastic, too. Emilia did really well considering she had no idea what was going on. We need to show her a real soccer game this week, and work with her on being aggressive. Her team won, I think, 2 goals to 1.

Saturday afternoon, Steve let me go to the library and write for a few hours. I was glorious. I finished outlining the novel I'm working on and wrote most of a chapter. While I was there, Steve came with the girls to return and check out new books. It was funny to watch him get the girls out of the car, with Cecily nearly running into the street before he noticed, then everybody grab hands and trail inside.

I am the cat's favorite human in the house. I'm pretty sure she thinks she owns me.

I will have to take some school pictures for Emilia and the other girls this week and post them. Have a good one!

Philosopher Emilia

I have LOVED the supplements I've been taking to help with my depression. Them, along with exercise, have helped me feel normal, capable, confident, and hopeful about life. But they're a little harder to maintain than prescription drugs, and that has been evident in my life over the last weeks. I'm figuring it out, and I like this better than the side-effects of prescription anti-depressants. If anyone is struggling with depression and would like to know more, I would love to talk about it. Give me a call or email me.

Despite a few days where I did not want to leave the house, or play nice with anyone, the week ended well. I also decided to try to potty-train Cecily this week. That didn't end well. Maybe in 6 months... 

We took a trip to the library Monday, so we would have plenty of books to entertain us while we were holed up with potty training. We ended up making these funny pictures on the computer in the kid's section.

We had a ward ice cream social Tuesday night up the canyon. Emilia also had soccer practice. She was frustrated at her first practice, because everyone else seemed so much better than her. Steve took her out Monday and practiced with her for an hour or so, and Tuesday's practice went much better. Her wisdom and faith surprise me and delight me at times, and this was one of them. When she got in the car after practice, I asked her how it went. She told me, "It was good!. Better than last time." I told her she had done well and suggested a couple things we could work on, like not laying down in the grass when the ball wasn't near her. I told her she had to pay attention to the ball, because if the other team got in in the goal more than her team, the other team would win. Then she said, "It's okay, Mom. We're having fun. And that's what's important, right? If we don't win, but we have fun, it's still kind of like winning." Yup. That's right, Emilia. That's right.

She had another practice Thursday afternoon. I had writing group that night, and Steve had friends over to play a new game while I was gone. We went for a walk one night. Friday night, I think. Saturday we got to go to the originally named Sandy Beach. Emilia found a live clam and brought it home. Before we left, I told her, "I'm okay with you bringing it home, but it's going to die if you do. As long as you're okay with that." She was okay with it dying. Not sure where philosopher Emilia went on that one.

I finished (mostly) my bedroom last week. Here are some pictures taken with my phone of the finished product.

And a cute picture of our kitty, just to round things off.

Tuesday the Great

My favorite day this week was Tuesday. Cinemark Theaters does dollar movies for kids during the summer. Apparently the times differ by location, but here they are every Tuesday at 10:00am. Three Tuesdays ago, they were playing a Chipmunks movie and I asked Emilia if she wanted to go, or do something else she wanted to. She didn't think Chipmunks looked that great (I don't blame her--not with the new ones anyway), so we looked at upcoming weeks and found that Nut Job was playing this last Tuesday. She thought it looked HILARIOUS. So for two weeks, she asked me constantly if it was movie Tuesday yet.

I was a little worried when we went that Cecily would be a pain, running around, or screaming for snacks, but she was a little angel. She sat on her chair without complaints, and when Mira said it was too hard for her to sit on her own chair, she shared hers. About 1/2 way through the movie, Cecily came to sit on my lap. She sucked her thumb and sat quietly on my lap the whole time. It was so sweet to cuddle with her for the better part of an hour. Everybody thought the movie was a crack up and they were quoting it all the way home.

After lunch, the neighbor girls were outside, so my girls played with them for a few hours. At 4:45, we had an appointment to take Flame for her first shots. Once again, all the girls were super excited, and they learned about being good pet owners. Since then, they have felt a lot more comfortable picking her up and playing with her. She's little and tends to bite and scratch them in play, but she has been quite good about letting them drag her around the house and make her houses. They even did a pet salon one day where they set up their little chair, put a pillow on it, sat her on it and then combed her with no less than three different combs. She sat on that chair for a good half hour just letting them be pet groomers.

Then Tuesday night, I got to visit a girlfriend of mine. We organized and decorated her craft area. It was fun to chat and organizing is always therapeutic for me.

The rest of the week was harder. The younger two were quite cranky. I don't know if Cecily is growing, or not getting enough sleep, but she was in destructo mode for 5 straight days. Gah.

Today, my whole family is getting together at my house as a goodbye get-together with Megan and her family before they move to Colorado on Friday. We will miss having them close by. One more excuse for us to visit Colorado, I guess. :)

Three Cuties (and not the orange kind)

I have cute kids.
Just thought I'd put that out there. :)

All the girls LOVE our cat, which mostly gets called Kitty instead of Flame.

This week was a good week until Saturday, which wasn't especially bad, it just wasn't good, over and over and over. I shouldn't complain, though. Like I said, it wasn't bad. It was just one of those days where it seemed like something went wrong with EVERYTHING I tried to do. I went garage saleing in the morning, and, trying to be nice to both Mira (who was up already) and Steve (who was not), I brought Mira with me. Mira got stung by a wasp, again. I came home and decided to measure our flower bed so I could get edging to hold the bark up. I ended up breaking our tape measure. I went to Home Depot to buy edging only to find the stuff we wanted was "online purchase only." But I did end up buying Steve a new grill clearanced from $330 to $99.

We decided to take the girls to Springville's new reservoir. And forgot all the sand toys and floaties. It ended up being fun, solely because other people were not using/keeping track of their sand toys and we were able to borrow them and build a sand castle. Emilia made some excellent decorations on the castle and dug a formidable moat. Mira worked very hard at making wet sand. And Cecily tried to destroy it. Luckily she didn't succeed.

All of them reading on my bed next to me while I worked on my computer. It seriously makes me so happy that they love books so much.

After a nap, I tried to take me and Emilia and Mira to Costco for dinner and some grocery shopping, only to arrive 15 minutes after they closed. We ended up going to IHOP and Walmart, which was all probably more fun than Costco.

Same day, different location. Lots of reading. :) That's our library.

I have been making an effort to put my kids first, so this week I tried to do things with them every day. We went to the library, the splash pad, and the reservoir. We rode a carousel, looked at children's art, and had a picnic lunch on the lawn. We started reading a new Oz book. Ozma of Oz this time. (We already finished The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz.) And we had three playdates.

This is Cecily's face every time we play the How to Train Your Dragon theme song which Steve purchased on Amazon.

Mostly what I learned, is that I have cute kids. Inside and out.