We did play family for a little, which involved telling each other jokes. Eventually we were feeling a little cold, which meant we walked through the house and played in the front yard! The girls splashed in the "puddles" on our walkway. I mean, in some places there were little puddles... Also, this is in the backyard still, but look how cute Winry is with that umbrella!
During the week, the girls did a good job of entertaining themselves. I think we're starting to get the hang of finding things in the house to entertain ourselves. The girls played with the marble run, and always have fun with that, though this time the bag of marbles got dumped between the seats on the couch... I believe I found them all that night when I was cleaning up, but I wasn't going to count 40 marbles. They girls also really like coloring on boxes when we get packages, and will color all of the sides of the box. Once the box is colored, it becomes a drum!
On Thursday, Brooke started her summer dance class, and the dance studio is having kids back at the studio for the summer classes! Brooke is doing hip hop this summer, and there's a good video going in next weeks blog of stuff she's learning. They're keeping the classes small, with 6 spots total. The first week Brooke was one of three girls at class, and this past week there were 4 total. She has been loving it and loves getting to go see her teacher in person again!
My dad was back out in Denver helping Tyson with the addition to his house. I'm going to have to go see it sometime... Anyway, he came down for dinner the night of Brooke's dance class and played with Winry while I took Brooke to dance. Here they are playing "grandpa can't see."
The girls continue to love playing in the van. I tried warning them that after we drove out to Utah in it they probably wouldn't love it as much anymore. In spite of my warnings they kept insisting on playing in the car. Here's Winry smashing her face on the window when we were getting them to come back inside. Also, note from the future: they STILL love playing in the van!! And the first thing they wanted to do when we got to Utah was to give everyone a tour of the van they just spent all day in! Not what I was expecting...
Speaking of the drive, here we are half way. We stopped in Rawlins for gas and went to a park to eat lunch and let the girls run around in the grass. It was really windy, but lunch was good, and the girls really enjoyed getting to stretch their legs. While we were there some deer came to visit! They just walked right out of the neighborhood. Eventually Winry noticed the deer and loved them!
Wizz wham wazoom, we made it to Utah. We only had that one stop in Rawlins and the girls were amazing in the car. Our van can play DVDs, so we started off the drive with a movie, and watched one more at the end because I wanted something on to listen to. Mostly, the girls colored and did various other activities I picked up at the dollar store earlier in the week. But mostly, it was coloring. Winry colored for at least 5 hours of the drive. They were rock stars, and I think having some extra space definitely helped!
So part of our reason for coming out was because I had a work trip in Utah on June 1-5th, and it's easier to leave the family with family than strand Monica on the island that is child care. As such, on Saturday (we drove out Friday) I had to go pick up my rental car for my work trip so I didn't have to steal our van. My rental car pick up was supposed to be the same time as closing, so I called to try to figure out if I could pick up my car early and found out the location I reserved my car at 5 days earlier was closed and my reservation was moved to a different location! I'm pretty sure the location was always closed... so anyway, it was a bit of a sprint to get to the car in time, but I ended up getting there. When I asked for the rental car I was asked if I needed anything special, and I said I wouldn't mind a sports car. I ended up with a Dodge Charger, and I won't complain about that!
On Sunday, we joined our primary call with Monica's family from on the other side of the couch where her parents were. Here's Winry, attention undivided.
After the call, Audrey came up to hang out with Brooke. They even both wore cherry dresses! What a bunch of cuties.
Sunday afternoon I headed off to visit my family before continuing up to Ogden for my trip. Family dinner was pot luck, and fortunately I brought some granola bars... :) Anyway, it was fun to see and spend some time with my mom and sisters before heading to my hotel. Meanwhile, back in Provo Winry would not go to sleep! The girls typically go to sleep at 7, but here's the scene at 8 o'clock! That girl doesn't look like she'll ever sleep! At 8:30 they finally got her to read herself a bedtime story. I think eventually she went to sleep.
Monday I started the beam trip. We were at a LINAC at Hill Airforce Base. We had to lock our phones away on arrival, so I don't have any pictures from my work week. We'd leave for the facility around 6 am every morning and get back to the hotel around 5-6 pm. Heading into the trip I expected my nights to be much more free than they really were, and so on Monday I headed back up to visit my mom. I went for a run up around their neighborhood too, which was a lot of fun. It was fun to run by the places I used to run during high school and the summers in college. However, this really meant that I got to my parents house and changed, and then returned from my run, showered, gave my mom a hug and headed back for my hotel. In actuality I did get to spend a little time with my mom, but not much. My evenings were definitely not as free as I had anticipated, and Monday was the only night I tried to squeeze a trip in. However, I did remember to take a picture with my mom, and my chronic down fall on the blog is forgetting to take pictures with people.
The test trip went well, but I don't really have anything to show for it, so we'll focus back on Provo for the week. I wasn't on any of these excursions, so may be Monica will add more information later when she proof reads this. One day everyone hiked up to a waterfall! I heard that Alan had to carry Winry a lot of the way. Good thing he was there! Here are the girls at the waterfall. It looks like everyone had a great time.
Another day, everyone headed to the beach at Utah lake. They didn't go in the water though because it was really muddy. Sitting in the shade probably felt better!
This was also an excellent week to be out in Utah as there were TWO cousin birthdays! Jack's birthday was on Wednesday, and he got a dog cake!
And that night he even read everyone a bed time story! What a great cousin!
Friday was Audrey's birthday, and I'm sure it was super double nice for her to have Brooke and Winry there. Brooke and Audrey played together all week long. As I looked through Monica's pictures there are a LOT less pictures of Brooke from this week, but that's probably due to Brooke always being off with Audrey, where as Winry spent time both with them and with Monica. Anyway, for Audrey's birthday they had a tea party! We knew ahead of time so Brooke could bring a princess dress!
Winry joined them too, sans princess outfit. They ate cheez-its (or cheesers as Winry called them!) and even got to put water in their cups!
Here's Brooke and Audrey being best friends on a chair. It's a really cute picture. Also, in this picture it amazes me how much clothes can affect the age appearance. I feel like Audrey looks a lot older than Brooke because she is wearing clothes I more associate with older children.
On Friday, after I finished up my last day at the facility, I headed down to spend time with my family. I headed to Niki's house first because I was going to help her with a sprinkler, but a real nice storm blew in so I got out of that job! I also took the opportunity to get some classy pictures with my car! In the end we headed up to my parents house and hung out with them for the night. My dad came back on Tuesday, and it turns out he brought Maren and Emilee with him, so there were more people and more fun than I expected awaiting us!
Saturday morning I headed back to Provo to drop off my rental car and pick up my family. We loaded up the van and headed up to spend a few days at my parents house. Saturday afternoon we went to visit my aunt, Alyson, and swim in her pool. The girls ended up not wanting to swim (it also was raining the whole time and fairly chilly to swim), but we got to tour Alyson's new camper trailer, and we got to see Barkley. We had a lot of fun and always love going to visit Aunt Alyson's!
Saturday night while we were reading bedtime stories, I found out a new Winry trick. We read her kitty book with pictures of various breeds of cats, and Winry will point at the cats and say "this one has skirf eyes." Don't know where skirf came from... pretty sure she made it up. Monica said earlier in the week when they'd read the story, every page Winry would say the kitty's name if she knew it and then say "I feel like this cat has skirf eyes!"
Sunday morning Winry got to eat a bunch of raspberries and stuck them on her fingers!
Our family has been doing a Nailed It challenge for the last while, and on Sunday we had to make a motor vehicle. Brooke made this pink flamingo!
We asked the kids what we (Monica) should make, and Brooke said "our car!!" So speaking of, I also got a better picture than the one of it in the garage that I posted before. Here's what our van really looks like.
And here's Monica's recreation! I'd say that looks amazing! I even tried to climb into this twice!
Brooke and Winry enjoyed getting to spend time with Maren and Emilee as well! It was a lot of fun having everyone out there!
And that brings us to the end of Sunday! I almost forgot to mention, while we were out there I kept my mom's VCR busy playing old Disney movies that I was digitizing onto my computer so we could watch them again! Hooray! We all had a great time seeing family, but unfortunately drove home the next day (Monday). I'll talk more about that in the next post, but we had a great time with everyone while we were out there! Stay tuned, I'll have another post coming out shortly (I hope!).
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