Sunday, August 22, 2010

Utah Part 3 - Tooele & The Snake

There are lots of pictures in this post, just warning you.

So on the 3rd of July we went back to Cville for the day.  Here is me mum, Luce, Mckell and Alyssa walking to the big Cville parade.
 Lucy loved it!  I didn't think it would keep her attention but it did.
 That night we headed out to Tooele for some fireworkage.  Here is Lu and Dad.  Yeah, she's chewing on a glow stick.  She thought those were the coolest things ever.
It got a bit chilly.  Cute Wren and Morgy.
 Lo and Heatha
The boys doing what they do best, play with fire.
The works.  I had fun with the firework setting on our camera.
Here is Lucy doing her happy 4th dance, glow sticks and all
The cute girlies in their matching shirts that Auntie Lolo made them.  Adorable aren't they? 
Luce just loved playing in the backyard at Gma Robin and Gpa Chuck's house.  They had all sorts of fun toys and sticks.  She just loves sticks.
Diggin' with Dylan
Aunt Lolo made Luce this cuuute owl dress for her birthday.  I love the fabric!
 On the 7th we headed up to the Snake River for the annual river trip.  This year it was quite eventful.  The day after we got there we went to visit Grandma and Grandpa Banbury in Afton and helped clean up their yard a little bit.  When we got back to our campsite we found each and every one of our camping chairs slashed(even the little kids chairs) and all the awnings too!  A little stinker of a boy came and wrecked havoc on all our stuff, for no reason at all.  I think the total damage was like $600 worth of stuff!  We were all pretty upset by the ordeal.  And the kid was only 12!  We had to get the police involved and hopefully it will all get resolved and everyone will get their money back.  So yeah, we had quite an eventful beginning of the trip and not a lot of chairs to sit on for the rest of it but we made do.  And we still had a good time.

This was on the way up to Wyoming.  Luce discovered her nose!  You ask her where her nose it and she gets all serious and points to the right nostril or up the right nostril.
This pic was taken the day we arrived(pre-chair slashing).  Those kids had themselves a grand old time.  Lucy loved playing with all the older kids. 
Lu and Wren bird
Those girls were the best babysitters ever.  They played with Lucy all day.  It was nice and relaxing for us. :)
We had spaghetti the first night and this girl pounded it.  She was really sad when it was all gone.  Can ya tell?
 The day after the yard work and chair slashing incident we decided it was time to go on the river.  It was sooo cold this year.  The rapids were pretty awesome, especially Kahuna!  We took Morgan and Dylan with us and got pounded on Kahuna.  We all fell out of the boat and had to scramble to pull ourselves back on before we hit Lunch Counter, which was also huge this year.  We threw the 2 traumatized kids back on the boat first and eventually got everyone on right before we hit Lunch Counter.  Heath saw his visor floating in the water so he dove out after it and rode through LC out of the boat.  Trey was the only one who actually got his oar in his hand by the time we hit LC so he steered us through and we all stayed in the boat through that.  Ha ha, all the adults were laughing and the kids were bawling.  Poor kiddos, the water was so cold.  I thought it was great fun though! :)
The next day we went to a little lake up the canyon for a change of scenery.  It had a rope swing!  Here we are dinking around on the ride up...

 This girl looks so much like her daddy, can anyone else see the resemblance?
Yeesh!
Dylan and Eddie the Basset Hound enjoying the lake
 Lucy liked it too.  This girl is such an outdoors gal.  I love it.
The Arizonians
Heath rockin' the rope swing
Trey's turn
 Hey look, I found a rock!  I think I'm going to put it in my mouth now.  Everything goes in the mouth!  I can't wait until she gets over that stage.
Luce loved having all those fun doggies around.
Awww!
Luce was pestering Eddie with a stick while he was trying to sleep.
It thought this was cute, napping with the doggies.
There was not a time when this girl did not have some kind of stick in her hand.
Dylan joined in on the fun
Lucy was being such a silly in the tent.  She would run around and jump on the bedding and run into the sides of the tent and then fall backwards.  Don't you love her dirty camping boogers?
Camping photoshoot...we are sooo hot.
Getting better...
Yes!  Lucy came to join in on the fun.
Nice...
Kissy wissy...
Don't really know why I'm biting Lucy's finger...
Trey and I have matching double chins!...awesome.  I know you are all just overcome by our attractiveness.
{end photoshoot}
Lucy was a much better camper here then she was when we attempted to camp in PA.  She slept right in between us at night and slept like a champ for the most part.  She would wake up every morning so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.  Here's the little stinker sleeping away.  We had to strip her down for her naps because it got a little warm during the day.  The nights were so nice and chilly, perfect sleeping temperature.

One more incident I must share from our trip was our kids float experience. 
The weather looked good (just a few clouds) so we thought it would be fun to take the little kids on a very lazy float down the part of the river where there isn't any rapids.  There were 3 adults(Trey, Chris, and I) and 4 kids(Lucy-1, Wren-5, Morgan-8, and Logan-3).  It started out just fine and then all of a sudden dark clouds started rolling in behind us.  We thought if we just kept paddling that we would be able to stay ahead of it, but that thing was moving a lot faster then we were.  It started to rain...no big deal...and then it started to rain a bit harder and the kids were getting cold.  We thought it would be okay to go a little farther and then pull off on the next island, turn the boat over, and wait the storm out.  Then, it started to hail!!  We're talking marble sized hail people!  It hurt!  I took my life jacket off and put it over Lucy to sheild her but all the other kids were getting pelted!  We quickly pulled up to the island, got out and propped the boat up using the oars and hid under it.  All the kids were crying, I'm sure they probably thought we were going to die.  Lucy was actually content chillin' there for a good 20 minutes while we waited the thing out.  The wind started whipping at one point and we thought the boat might just fly away.  Luckily, it didn't!
As we were sitting there I was trying to think of ways we could calm the kids down and make them forget about how cold they were.  We started talking about other things and then it popped in my head, "Say a prayer."  Duh!  Why hadn't we thought of that sooner?  We said a prayer and soon after it calmed down and we were able to finish the float. 

So there you have it, our crazy 2010 Banbury river trip adventure.  This one will go down in the books!  And I'm pretty sure Morgan is never going to want to get on a boat ever again after those 2 experiences she went through.

For the final 5-week Utah trip post, we head back to Tooele and then to Kaysville to stay with Mike and Mandy.

Yay I'm almost done with my Utah posts!

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Utah Part 2 - Cache Valley

Sorry it took me a while to get to part deux. We moved to a larger apartment a few weeks ago and they finally hooked up the internet a few days ago. Yeah, I was dying! Is that sad? Maybe so. Oh well, I'm over it.

Anyway...

Here is what we did after our stay in Cville...

We stopped at our friends house in Brigham City for a visit. They cooked us a fabulous dinner (thanks again Morbizzles!) and introduced us to Ginger Beer. Mmmm...
Yeah, that is their sweet little daughter Berkley just chillin' in the hutch in her Bumbo, ha ha! She seemed quite content to just sit there while we ate.
Here we are in good old Wellsville. It felt so nice to be back in our Cache Valley and surrounded by mountains once again. We stayed with my sweet Grandma Darley. Here we are hanging out on the porch swing just enjoying the country air. It was so nice being there. Lucy loooved Grandma Great's house and she loved watching the birds. Grandma is a bird watcher so she has a bird bath and several bird feeders and it attracts all sorts of fun birdies.
There's my G-ma, isn't she just the cutest grandma ever? I think so. She always dresses so stylish too. I just love her to pieces.
Here is her pink house, the house that my mother grew up in.
Swinging on the old wood swing (that consists of rope and a piece of wood placed on it). I always used to fall off that thing.
Here is the old red barn right behind their house. Awesome, isn't it? I love the Wellsville Mountains in the background. Oh and the neighbor's donkey in the front.
Luce enjoying being outside.
We celebrated Trey's birthday at G-mas and I'm pretty sure this was his favorite gift he received from me and Luce...
We met some friends at Texas Roadhouse for dinner and of course we had to get them to embarrass Trey for his birthday. Here he is, riding the saddle with his ice cream. He totally looks like a little boy, I love it.
Check out Lucy's reaction to all the singing and hooting and hollering...scared the poor girl half to death.
The Jensens. These people are hilarious, and their boy Jack is too freakin' cute. We miss them a lot.
Our buddies the Fraziers and their cute little bush baby Finn. He was soo tiny!
And here's us. This was the only family picture we took so I figured I should probably post it.
Trey and Dennen were feeling adventurous and decided to hike the Wellsville mountains(which are huge!) one morning. Here are some pics from the hike...






Someday I'd like to hike it too. Maybe when we're done having kids and they're all big enough to go with us and not complain...haha, yeah right! Someday I really will hike it though, it's on my bucket list.
We headed over to Trey's sissy's house for a few days after our stay in Wellsville. Lucy had sooo much fun playing with her cousins Wren and Dylan. Here she is playing with one of Wren's hats...
Silly monkey
We went to the awesome Logan zoo one night with the Mylers and then we just had to have some Sub Zero ice cream, which was the bomb!
It was so fun to be back in the Cache Valley for a week. We saw our Bishop and his wife Cecille from our old married student ward. What great people! I went to my old workplace, good old Icon, and said hello and brought Lucy with me. I miss seeing my work friends everyday. It was great seeing everyone and just catching up on office gossip and nonsense. Oh and we also were in town during the Crusie In and got free tickets to the event. I'm sad we didn't bring our camera because there were some pretty sweet classic cars. And also some good people watching. :)
Well I think that's about it for that part of our stay.

Our next locations: Tooele and the Snake River for some Banbury family fun!