Beginning of June

We drove by a roadkill alligator on the side of the road and had to go back to check it out. Only in Florida!

James decided to take a break from karate over the summer and try the YMCA swim league. They practice four days a week and have swim meets every Saturday! For the most part, he is loving it, but he doesn't love the early morning practices.

James had a birthday party for a friend from his class and I wasn't feeling well, so I had Anthony take him. They stayed at the party for over 5 hours! Anthony got to talking to the dad about his garden/plants and they really hit it off. When they finally got home, James realized he forgot his shoes at their house! So the next day we stopped by their house just to grab the shoes and ended up staying for another 5 hours talking and playing on the water slide they still had up from the birthday party.

The kids discovered that if they stacked up they would get more momentum to reach the end of the slide. It was a long slide! They also got a hold of an industrial size bottle of dawn dish soap and put sooooo many bubbles on the slide!

It was finally time for our trip to Utah that had been postponed for over a year due to COVID. We were all beyond excited!!

James initially was assigned the aisle seat across from me and Rett. The night before our flight James watched tons of youtube videos of things to know when flying on a plane. When I realized that the seat next to Rett was going to be empty, I told James to go ahead and move to sit with us, but he insisted on asking the flight attendant first because youtube told him that the weight has to be distributed correctly. He took it very seriously!

Watching movies!

As we got close to Utah, we were able to see a wildfire from the seat window:

The next morning I went out for an early run to enjoy the mountain weather. The day before there was a crazy cold front and it was in the 50's! I was so cold, but it was really cool to see the beautiful scenery.

Utah has the best recreation places for families! This rec center had indoor and outdoor water slides, a lazy river, a wave pool, and splash pad and it costs around $4/person! You would never find that in Florida.

Teya babysat for us a lot while we were there so that we could go out to eat for dinner. It was amazing!!! We ate so much great food while we were there. Not having to cook is a different level of vacation that I am 100% here for.

Trying out crumbl cookies:

Rett requested that we go to a bookstore, so we checked out this used bookstore in downtown Provo. Rett was not impressed with their kids graphic novel section, but I got a few good books.

Most days Jared opened his breakfast diner and made amazing food for us. Seriously, homemade breakfasts and restaurants for dinner? Does it get any better??

We spent a day at a large water park. Rett hung out in the lazy river the. entire. time. James was too scared to do any of the water slides since they were so high up, so he went back and forth between the lazy river and the wave pool. I hung out with Rett for a while and then I sat in the shade and read a book while everyone played. It was absolute heaven.

Beautiful sunset:

One morning we decided to go exploring around the neighborhood. Rett kept insisting that he wanted to "climb a mountain" so this was our attempt to do some mountain climbing with him. It is way harder than it looks! Our shoes kept slipping and sliding on small rocks and it was really hard to keep your balance.

Anthony and I could not get over the gorgeous roses that so many people had in the front yard landscaping! We never see roses like this at home and there was such a variety of colors.

Rett and James loved getting to be in person for primary at Happy and Jared's ward since our ward was still doing zoom for 2nd hour. 

Since their church building is just down the street from their neighborhood, the kids rode to church in the back of the truck so we didn't have to take two cars.

We also got to check out the new temple being built in their neighborhood!!! Amazing!!

The boys loved their minivan, especially after they discovered that the middle seats have footrests AND recline. They also have a hotspot in the car so they can watch Netflix or Disney plus. One day we will be as cool as them and have a car like that!

We visited Anthony's parents at the campground they are hosts at for an afternoon barbeque. While we were waiting for the food to cook, everyone got their nails painted. Rett thought it was really cool and even asked me to fix them a few days later when they started chipping. James refused to do it because they only had purple nail polish. He said he would have done it if it was a different color.

Watermelon seed spitting contest:

Anthony took the boys for a walk around the campground and they found these huge dandelions! 

Olympic X-game pedestals. Rett is pouting and walking away because he didn't want to be 3rd.

Showing me his dandelion:

Food time!

Rett wanted to try Dallin's electric scooter. We are lucky he didn't break any bones!

One our way home we stopped at a hot spring called Homestead Crater. Over time the hot springs created a limestone crater over it that you can walk on and look down on the spring. We were too late to go inside the crater to see the spring, but we did get to see it from the top.

We found a bunch of cairns so the boys added some of their own:

Cool flower that Anthony "accidentally" found on the ground and didn't pick at all ;)

Trying out a reservoir for fishing and swimming. Rett found a friend to talk to almost the entire time we were there, so he was as happy as a clam. 

James was grumpy that he couldn't find a life jacket that fit him the way he wanted it to. It was fun.

Anthony was trying to have some success fishing, but they had no luck.

James tried out paddle boarding for the first time. He really liked it!

Nolan decided to give Rett piano lessons and Rett was so excited!! He was trying to follow along on a lesson in an app and started to get frustrated that he couldn't remember which key was what note.

Nolan jumped up and said he knew exactly what to do. He got a dry erase marker and wrote the key names on the piano keys for Rett. It was seriously the sweetest thing I've ever seen!!

We attempted kayaking/paddleboarding at Tibble Fork resevoir. The water was sooooooo cold! The wind was really strong also, so we didn't end up staying as long as we thought. It was still cool to explore!

Rett got in the kayak with me and had fun ordering me to go faster or to stop dripping cold water on him from the paddle :)

James and Nolan tried out separate kayaks first and then moved to a kayak together. The water was so cold, it added an extra layer of anxiety to being on the water because you did NOT want to accidentally fall in!

Anthony again tried to catch some fish and again had no luck.

Rett and I went for a walk around the reservoir. The path started out easy and then quickly became very narrow, steep, and slippery in our flip flops! Rett was very nervous about falling and had a death grip on my hand. At one point he said, "I don't know why, but I just feel so much better when I hold your hand". Melt my heart!

Serious fishermen:

For most of our trip, Rett had a very wiggly front tooth that was hanging on by a thread. He was barely eating because he was afraid of making his tooth bleed, and the hunger was making him extra whiny. A few days earlier Anthony even offered him $15 in addition to whatever the tooth fairy would give him if he would just yank it out and be done with it. Rett immediately countered with, "$20?". Anthony laughed and agreed, but Rett still refused to pull it out. After eating lunch at the reservoir, Rett's tooth finally came out! He was excited to have it out, but also very disappointed to discover that the $20 offer expired on the day it was given.

Every week Crumbl has different flavors, so we had to stop and try the new week's flavors. I am very lucky there isn't a cookie store like this close to where we live or I would be in big trouble!

The boys and I went for a quick walk around the neighborhood to do a little geocaching and we stumbled across the coolest group of geocaches! Our small walk turned into over an hour-long trek because we wanted to keep going! The first one was a cool escape-room-type box in someone's yard. You had to solve the clues to find the letters to the padlock to open the cache.

The next one was in a plastic rat hanging from a sewer drain. So creative!

The next one was in a tube under the ground connected to fake poop!

Mailbox in a tree:

Later that day it was half-off arcade games at the entertainment place in town so we decided to check it out.

Rett got the high score on the space invaders game and he was very proud of himself!

They had a cool laser beam game where you go in a room with your teammates and try to cross without touching any lasers.

Glow in the dark mini-golf!

In the evening we brought the cousins to check out the awesome geocaches we found and find some more placed by the same person.

This one was a pringles tube that when you opened it up, a large fake snake popped out! The first time they opened it, Happy and I both screamed!

Rett was across the yard and didn't see us open it, so we put it back in and tried to get a video of him opening it and getting scared. We told him, "Here are the pringles" and after he opened it and the fake snake popped out he wasn't phased at all! He was just confused and asked where the pringles were.

Beautiful view, as always:

Geocache under a lamppost by the new temple:

Sneaky geocache that was a small magnet on the electric box. Dallin was the genius that found that one!

We went back to the sewer drain rat geocache and in the period of time since we found it that morning, the owners had replaced the geocache with a totally different container!

Riding in the back of the truck between geocaches. The boys waaaaay preferred doing it this way compared to all of our walking we did in the morning.

This one wasn't as fun, it was just a random container attached to a stick in a field:

Last geocache for the day: a Darth Vader mask hidden in the branches of a tree!

For the last day of our visit, Anthony got to geek out over plants/trees/landscaping with Happy and work on their backyard and garden. It is so funny to me that Anthony found a way to do an intense outdoor project on his vacation, but I've decided that manual labor outside really is his happy place!

Rett wrote a note to the tooth fairy after we realized his tooth fell out of my pocket at the reservoir. It says, "I lost my tooth. I mean lost. Can I get money? P.S. 15 dollars please PPS my vacation :)" He didn't get 15 dollars, but he did get $2 and a bag of gummy bears so he was pretty happy!