Kiersten’s Blog

Our last leg of our vacation was spent in Sacramento for a Whitaker reunion (my mom and her sisters).  I always love getting together with my cousins.  We grew up visiting each other and writing letters since we lived all over the west (mostly coast).  Now it’s fun to get together with our kids and let the kids play.  We spent some time at my parents house (which happens to be right next door to my grandma’s house.  The kids got to spend some time with the grandparents and we got to slow down a bit after a few crazy days of traveling.

When most cousins were in town, we met on Thursday night for gelato at The Fountains in Roseville.  The gelato was great and so was the company.

The kids played for a while around the fountain until they were ready for bed.

The kids were really excited about this lion we saw

I don’t remember what kind of gelato I ended up with (probably mint chocolate because that’s always the best.  Oh, I do remember, half mint chocolate and half some chocolate hazelnut yumminess), but I do remember that Ashton wanted a pink one.  I had him try strawberry and raspberry but he kept pointing at the rose petal one and saying, “that pink one!”  So I got him that pink one but I had them only give me half rose petal and half strawberry since I was sure he wouldn’t like it and would want strawberry.  I was wrong.  He ate all of the rose petal half and left the whole strawberry half.  Weird.

We spent most of the day Friday with cousins at the sprayground.  For some reason, my kids are not huge sprayground fans but they had a lot of fun with their second cousins and they loved playing at the adjoining park.

We couldn’t find London’s swimsuit bottom, so the poor girl had to go in her underwear.  It was a little traumatic at first, but it didn’t take her long before she forgot all about it and had a great time.

To be continued . . .

The next day was spent at Yellowstone.  Brittany and her family joined us.  I went to Yellowstone a number of times as a student at BYU-Idaho.  It was fun to go again with my family.  Before we got there, though, we had to stop in Ashton for a photo-op.

We took the south loop and saw some amazing things.  We stopped at some mud pots.

Then, of course we stopped at Old Faithful.  I was ready to leave before it went off because the kids were driving me nuts, but I’m glad we stayed to see it.  It’s pretty incredible.  The kids also thought it was pretty cool.

After Old Faithful, we hit the road so that we could make it all the way around the loop and see the waterfalls and the grand canyon of Yellowstone before it got dark.

It took a little longer than expected because there were bison crossing the road.

Luckily we got there just in time.  As we pulled up, the wind was blowing and the rain was starting.

We snapped a couple of pictures and were on our way, stopping at a cute little diner in West Yellowstone for dinner.  It was late by the time we got back to Brittany and Kirk’s house and the next day was a long, long drive.  I think our day was worth it, though.

I still have a number of entries to write about our vacation.  Someday I’ll have it all caught up.  Today you get to hear about our travels in Idaho.  After the reunion was over, we decided to spend an extra couple of days in Idaho.  We had a week before our next reunion started in Sacramento so we thought we would take advantage of our free time and see some sights.  We spent our first day visiting Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park.

It’s kind of pathetic that in all of my 7 years spent in Rexburg, I never once went to the Grand Tetons and only visited Jackson Hole twice.  People come from all over the world to see these sights and I was just a couple of hours away and never went!  We had a nice little visit this time.  It’s beautiful there.

"Look, Mom, I have antlers!"

Jenny Lake and the Tetons

I told Taylor to take a different way back so we could go by the ski resort in Teton Village, but instead of me watching the scenery, I fell asleep and missed the whole thing.  Bummer.  We did, however, have a great day and saw some beautiful sights.

Our main purpose of our trip to Idaho was for a family reunion on my dad’s side.  Much of his family still lives in Alberta.  I even have a cousin in Alaska.  Rexburg seemed to be a pretty central location.  Plus, Brittany wanted to plan it and she lives in Rexburg.  We rented a house in Idaho Falls where a lot of us stayed.  It was fun staying up late and chatting with cousins and aunts and uncles.  Living so far away, we don’t see that side of the family very often.  Some cousins I haven’t seen in probably 15 years or more.  I had a great time with them and getting to know all of them again.

We had a lot of fun activities planned.  We spent one day at the park where we had a barbecue.

The kids played at the sprayground and got to ride the carousel.

If you can't tell, my kids aren't huge sprayground fans. Plus, she was a little on the cold side.

That afternoon, Taylor and I went with a couple of my cousins and their spouses (we dumped the kids off on the grandparents) and headed over to the BYU-Idaho campus for a look around.  We haven’t been back since we moved almost seven years ago.  In that amount of time, many things have changed.  New buildings have been built and additions and renovations have been made to many existing buildings.

This is where Taylor and I spent all of our time as students, and consequently, where we met.

The university has grown to more than twice the size it was when I started there in 1998.  It was exciting to see what has been done and what is being done.

The next day we went to Mesa Falls.  There is a mile-long trail to see the lower falls, which Taylor, Alan, Brittany, and I all ran while everybody else went to the upper falls.

It was a nice little run and definitely nice to get some exercise.  The view was gorgeous.  After our run, we met up with the rest of the family and walked over to see the upper falls, which was also fantastic.

That evening, Wayne and Jenna blessed their baby girl at the house and we all sat around listening to stories from my grandma and her kids.

I really had a nice time with the Henrie’s and hope it’s not another 15 years before we all get together again.

The second day of our vacation started out with a run.  I knew I needed to keep up on my running while we were gone so I ran 5 miles with Alan.  Then he had to get to work and we had to get to Idaho so we parted ways and were off.  On our way to Idaho Falls where we were staying, we stopped at my aunt and uncle’s house in Blackfoot.  That place was surreal.  I have forgotten how different Idaho is to what I’m used to now in San Diego.  I lived in Idaho for 6 years.  Granted, I didn’t see it very often without a blanket of snow, but the country is so beautiful.  The sky is so big and we could see for miles.  From my aunt and uncle’s house, we could look one way and see the storm rolling in.

Off to the other side, the sky was bright and sunny.

The fields seemed to go on forever.  They air was fresh and there were linens blowing on the lines.

We went outside to see the chickens and ducks and to feed the horses.

London (who won’t admit it, but is afraid of dogs) had her hand in the horses mouth feeding it!

The kids were so excited to be out in the country!  They’ve never experienced anything like it.  We had such a great time.  I forget how different life is out there.  And once we had soaked it all in, it tried to soak us all in and the rain started.

11 days.  7 states in as many days.  2 nights of sleeping through the night.  2 national parks.  2 family reunions.  3000+ miles of driving.  1 extra kid for a week.  754 photos.  1 tired family.

Someday soon I’ll be back with photos to post and details to relay.  But don’t get your hopes up for this week.  I’m just hoping for a decent night’s sleep and a house that might not look like it has been hit by a hurricane.

We’ve been busy. If you would like to see what we’re up to, check out Taylor’s zaps. I’m not around my computer to load pictures and write. We’re having too much fun. But Taylor posted pictures. See here: http://42a6.zapd.co/
and here: http://42wf.zapd.co/
and here: http://43e4.zapd.co/

For father’s day, Taylor and his dad both got a day-long rental for a stand-up paddle board.  Taylor’s parents had some time yesterday, so they came down so the men could use their vouchers.  The kids and I had a birthday party to attend, but Taylor’s parents picked him up and headed to Mission Bay.  We met them there after the party and spent the rest of the afternoon playing at the bay.  None of us had ever tried the stand-up paddle boarding before.  It was a fun experience!  Taylor and his dad spent plenty of time on the boards before I got there, so Steve let me take a little paddle around the bay on his board.

proof.

I was sure I would fall and be soaked, but to my surprise, I didn’t fall once!  Granted, we were just in the bay so there were no waves, but I was still pretty proud of myself.  The kids especially loved it.

Taylor took Ashton out and Steve took London.

Neither of the kids wanted to come back in.  And when we finally convinced them to get off the boards, they stayed in the water and swam for the rest of the day.

It was kind of nice to not be at the beach with the waves so I didn’t have to worry so much about them or be right there with them every moment they were in the water.

The life vests helped with my comfort zone too.  Altogether it made for a nice beach day.  We’ll have to do it again sometime.

Since Taylor is now working Monday evenings, we have switched our family home evenings to Sundays.  Tonight for our activity we played a fun game of iHide and Seek.  I got the idea from this month’s Family Fun magazine.  Ashton and I were on a team and Taylor and London were on a team.  They hid (with Taylor’s iPhone) while Ashton and I counted.  Then we started looking.  After a minute or so, we Facetimed them from my iPod touch for a video clue.  They showed us the bike trailer and we were off to the garage to find them.  Then it was our turn to hide while they counted.  The kids LOVED it!  It was a lot of fun.  With kids so small, our clues were pretty obvious, but with older kids, you could just give less obvious clues.  My kids love to hide and I don’t think we’ve ever played hide-and-seek with them.  Sure, they hide and yell for us to find them, but we’ve never played a real game of it before.  Ashton was so funny.  I told him to close his eyes so he would squint them up closed really tight while we both counted to 20 (yes, he can count to 20 on his own).  Then when it was our turn to hide, I would tell him that he had to be quiet so he would whisper quietly while trying to stay hidden.  We had a great time.  We’ll have to try it outside next time.

P.S. If you want to read about our mini vacation, I blogged about it on my San Diego blog so go check it out.  And while you’re there, you might as well just subscribe because I know you’re not already subscribed to enough blogs.

We’ve been having so much fun lately that I haven’t had time to blog!  Now I feel like I’m so far behind I don’t know where to start.  I’ll give a brief synopsis of what we’ve been up to and you can go check out more details over at sandiegoforfamilies.wordpress.com.  But don’t expect much to be up tonight.  I’m still in recovery mode.

Anyway, last Friday was dress-like-a-cow-day at Chick-fil-A.  By doing so, they hook you up with a free meal.

We found out about this day last year and London thinks it’s a national holiday.  She asks me probably monthly when the next dress-like-a-cow-day will be.  When I found out about it this year, I knew we had to go.  The kids thought it was great and I’m not one to ever turn down free food, especially from Chick-fil-A so I’ll say the evening was a success.  It was followed by a nice evening with the Porters/Orlandos/Bakers where we celebrated Derek and Courtney’s engagement!  Again, a successful evening.  On Saturday we were able to be in the temple with Holli as she received her endowments.  What a wonderful experience!  I love the temple.

On Monday we took our first post-broken elbow beach trip.  London still wore her splint, but that didn’t keep her out of the water or the sand.  She’s healing nicely and hopefully in a week she’ll be back to normal.  For now, she has to take the splint off every day and move her elbow around.  Then she sleeps without the splint.  So we’re making progress.  But back to the beach.  I’m excited that we can actually start going again.  London had a great time playing in the sand, even with our sad, sad collection of sand toys (which included a shovel and a pail and a watering can).

"Look, Mom! I have a mermaid tail!"

Ashton wanted nothing to do with the sand, but everything to do with the water.

We even saw a nasty looking beached jelly fish.  Yuk.

Tuesday was our preparation day for Disneyland on Wednesday.  We had a great time!  Taylor’s whole family (minus Denver who’s in India on a mission) was there.

I told London that we would spend time seeing the characters rather than riding rides since, at the time, I didn’t really know what her elbow situation would be.  She was fine with that.  Sure, we went on a few rides, but the lines we stood in the longest were for the characters.

Ashton was so excited to see Micky and Flynn Rider.  FYI, the Rapunzel/Flynn Rider line was 90 minutes.  And we stood in it.  I think we deserve a medal.

Please don't tell Ashton to smile in a picture. This is what you get.

Anyway, we left around 10 (after World of Color) and stayed in a hotel in Anaheim (thanks to a good friend and a hook-up).  What a fun little trip!

Today I took the kids on our weekly zoo trip.  In case you’re wondering, I’m pretty tired.  We’ve had a great week!