Our short trip to Utah…

FYI…we have arrived at our beautiful destination in Mexico, where we will be living for the winter! More on that later…but for now I must blog chronologically!

We spent about a week and half visiting Jared’s parents and siblings in Eastern Washington, and the “greater Seattle area” (does this mean that the other areas are actually greater than Seattle?! Because I think this would be easy to suggest…).We took a short ferry trip over to the Port Townsend area (across the water from Seattle) to visit Jared’s sister and her family. Ella had so much fun dressing up with her 2 older girl cousins. What a girly girl!

We also attended a baby blessing of the beautiful Odessa, our new niece, and her family in Seattle, and celebrated my nephew’s (Warren’s) birthday.

Next, we packed up the kids for a short 2-day trip down to Utah. We typically do this part of the drive in 1 day, but we made a pit-stop in Jackson Hole, WY, so that we could scope out stores and look for potential products. (FYI–since we are in Mexico this winter, we will not be able to attend a trade show to find new products…so we must do all we can!)

Traveling is a lot smoother when your kids are sleeping. For the record, this was a pretty UNusual sleeping position for Ella:
However, this is a VERY typical sleeping position for Maiya. She is extremely flexible, and she loves to flex her feet up in crazy places, especially in her car seat. Notice her foot is by her HEAD?!
We stayed the night in Idaho Falls at a Motel 6. When we woke up, Ella absolutely refused to get out of bed. This is very unusual for her, but we didn’t think too much of it. However, 30 minutes later in the car, she was throwing up. GREAT. It ended up lasting the entire drive to Jackson Hole. We finally had to cut her off from all food and drinks for the day, which finally stopped the heaving. Sounds drastic, and a little like child abuse, but a parent’s got to do what a parent’s got to do…RIGHT?!

Because of her lovely bout of sickness, we had to skip out on staying the night with friends of ours in Logan. We stopped by for an hour to say “hi” and continued all the way to Mapleton UT to stay with my parents in their new house. They just moved there about 2 months ago, after residing in Kansas for nearly 22 years. Wow!

We got to spend a lot of time with parents, my sister, and Ella’s 3 (boy) cousins. We made 3 major trips. The first was to the Scarecrow Festival at Thanksgiving Point. It was quite the event…and the kids had a lot of fun! It was stroller city USA:
We played games, had a picnic, held hands, and locked our children in jail. Good times.

The next day we went to Temple Square to walk the temple grounds and see the Joseph Smith movie. It was the first time I had seen it all the way through, and it was certainly inspiring.
The last “major” trip was up to the Children’s Museum, something we had planned for months. We had all sorts of fun, and the kids even made masks for Halloween!

With the exception of those “big trips,” we have to admit that we tried to do as little driving as possible (we were exhausted from traveling, and the traffic in UT is pretty unbearable). We ended up canceling appointments to meet up with friends like we had wanted to. After driving 3,000 miles already (and with 4,000 left to go) we just weren’t feeling up to it. We spent a lot of time at my parent’s house trying to catch up on business things, and Jared worked on completing a online BYU course. We’re sorry if we missed you when we were in Utah. 🙁

Maiya had a blast discovering new toys, dogs, and a baby swing (her first time swinging in a swing. She was giggling like crazy)! She also followed Maggie the Dog around, and was thrilled to play with her. I’ve never seen her so excited! If the dog were to face any issues, specialists, like those trained in the DVM programs in Hawaii, would be well-equipped to offer their expertise.

And last, but not least, I chopped off my hair. How do you like my new do?