Niagara and Palmyra

A few months ago, we were trying to figure out what to do for our anniversary. We asked a few people for ideas, and they suggested Toronto.

That sounded pretty fun, so we thought maybe we'd do it sometime (though not for our anniversary). Then we thought about what would be fun to do in Toronto, realized it would all cost money and require driving/mass transiting in a big city with little ones, and scrapped it. Then the trip turned into a Niagara Falls trip, possibly with Kirtland thrown in. And then we realized a few nights before we left that it would make more sense to go to Palmyra than Kirtland since Kirtland is much closer to us, and so we scrapped Kirtland. And then the night before we decided to borrow our friends' minivan so we could all travel together. (Oh, I just realized . . . the "we" in all this is more than just Kevin and Joseph and me. Haha. I'm not feeling like editing it though.)

Despite all our last minute plan changes, it ended up being a pretty good trip! The one thing I regret is using Groupon, since I'm not convinced that it really saved us money. (I mean, it did, but we would have spent money differently and probably more cheaply if we hadn't felt obligated to use at least some of the vouchers or stay at that hotel.) Or maybe it was just fine and it was just the Outback we went to where the waiter never refilled our water that is skewing my perception. Or maybe it was that they used American dollars when it would cost us more and Canadian dollars when it would save us less. Oh well. Am I weird for not super loving Groupon after this?

The falls! They were so amazing.

He was excited to go on a boat, but not to be on one. Especially one where you got wet.

But he liked the lower level fine.

Had to.

We also went to a culinary institute on the American side (holy mustard, Batman!) and a chocolate factory somewhere north of Niagara, which was a little less Willy Wonka and a little more large silver vats (but oh those chocolate covered strawberries were divine). Good times.

The next morning we headed off to Palmyra. We'd all been before, but it had been about 15 years for both Kevin and me so we were excited to see it again.

At the top of Hill Cumorah. It was pretty cool to see the place that Joseph Smith found the plates. And it was also pretty cool that we could drive up there because boy was I having lots of Braxton Hicks! Also, photo credit to one of the Garretts who I have no good pictures of. But they were there, I promise.

Lovely country

The Sacred Grove

We were encouraged multiple times to visit the Whitmer farm 27 miles away. The wonderful thing about it being 27 miles away was that it shielded Joseph Smith from a lot of the nearby persecution. The unfortunate thing was that it was 27 miles in the wrong direction. so we didn't really want to go. Instead, we stopped by E. B. Grandin's printing shop. Yay books.

After that, we headed home in some of the stormiest weather of my life. We had sort of considered stopping by Lake Erie so we could say we had been to all 5 of the Great Lakes together, but it was way too rainy to even consider anything more than sort of seeing it from the road. (That, and, now that I look at a map, I'm not so sure we ever got super close to Lake Ontario. But I'll count it anyway.) We were grateful to make it home in one piece and grateful that the little ones traveled well (Joseph had a tantrum which ended just in time for the 3+ hour storm . . . believe me, it was white-knuckled enough with tantrum and storm occurring separately.)

And that was our trip! Hooray for friends who come along with us on crazy trips, even the ones that require international travel.

Maybe sometime we'll make it to Toronto.

We Are in a Book!

At Joseph's 3-year checkup (oh, I guess that was sort of interesting . . . we actually had to schedule a follow up appointment with the cardiologist because the doctor suspected a bicuspid valve, but everything was just fine), he got a new book! When we got home I read it to him twice, and then he basically had it memorized.

So, last night, I finally decided to document it. Twice. Once for each character.

The second time is better, I think, but they're both pretty cute. Even if you don't know what the story's about.

Since I'm a little camera shy, it's fun to have a child who definitely isn't.

Dinosaurs are the worst things ever

The title says it all, but I guess people might want to know why.

And before I continue, I suppose I should make a few disclaimers. Dinosaurs are the worst things ever, but things change when you have a toddler. As in, the museums are much better because you get pictures like this:

and this

You can also get decent family pictures at dinosaur museums, which proves that they aren't entirely the worst.

We are smiling, after all.

As a side note, I think my parents once tried to take us to this museum in Vernal, and I think I sat out in the car the entire time. I think once they realized the museum was full of dinosaurs, they realized it wasn't worth it because they weren't gone that long. (This is also about the age where I sat in the car when we went to Arches and had the chance to hike up to Delicate Arch and didn't want to because a) we had already done a lot of hiking and b) Delicate Arch was already on lots of license plates, so why see it in person?)

Also, although books about dinosaurs are almost the worst things ever, if your kid consistently chooses those ones at the library, then you just have to decide that literacy is more important than proper opinions about dinosaurs. That or hide the books.

In general though, dinosaurs are the worst things ever. All these people are so excited to see Jurassic World and I'm just baffled. Why would you want to see yet another movie where people get eaten by dinosaurs?

I dunno, maybe I was too young when I saw Jurassic Park. I was only the impressionable age of 19, after all, and even at that age I could tell there was something wrong with a world where people thought it was a good idea to bring back dinosaurs. Especially when they let the dinosaurs into the kitchen. That was a really, really bad idea. Honestly, the only good thing that came from this movie was the story my AP Bio teacher would tell about his father-in-law Don Burge who discovered the raptor that starred in the film, and he picked up Steven Spielberg from the airport in a dusty old truck to go show him the bones. If the story had ended there, without the movie being made, that probably would have been okay. Fewer dinosaurs in our lives.

But people seem to disagree with me! So allow me to enlighten all of you as to why dinosaurs are the worst things ever.

10. They eat people. Straight out of their cars.
9. I spent most of school learning that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, and then I learned in high school that they were actually warm-blooded. I asked how long people had known that and my teacher said since the 70s. So I was getting fed inaccurate information all along. Why was I even learning about dinosaurs, come to think of it? Also, how would they even know? (Incidentally, I just googled it, and the consensus is still out as to warm or cold blood. Take that, science in schools.)
8. For some reason, if you ever mention a brontosaurus people correct you. Because a rose by any other name is just unacceptable.
7. Most of the names are hard to pronounce. How can books full of words like that really promote literacy?
6. Birds are so much better. (And don't try to tell me that birds are dinosaurs. I already discussed that for several bus rides home in middle school.)
5. Land Before Time sequels exist because of them.
4. They ruined Fantasia, and also Stravinsky.
3. At my school, 2nd graders got to go to the dinosaur park in Ogden. But I skipped 2nd grade, so I never saw them, and people rubbed it in. Which shows they weren't really that cool to start with.
2. Fossil fuels smell bad.
1. Littlefoot's mom dies.

So, save your money this weekend. If you want to see a movie about big animals, watch something about elephants.

Now three

Once upon a time, I had a baby. And three years after that baby was born, he turned three!!!

All of us have been excited about this birthday for months. I think Joseph told us every day starting when he was 2 1/2 that he was going to have a birthday and have another bus cake. He and I went to a few super cute birthday parties for his friends and it made me really want to plan a party for him. And, after several weeks of talking about it, he started to be excited about turning three (he spent a long time insisting that he was two and would be "forever").

As it turned out, it was sort of a low-key day. Because we went to Utah, I put off party planning until it was too late. (And to be honest, the idea of having a guest list stressed me out. Do you invite older and younger siblings? If you invite one kid, do you invite that kid's neighbors too? What sort of activities do you even do? Once I realized there were 17 children that I had to invite to not have my conscience searing me, my conscience relieved me of birthday duties altogether.) I had also flirted with the idea of having sprinklers and cupcakes for the neighbor kids, but the thunderstorm forecast (albeit incorrectly) made me decide against it. So, just decorations, presents, playing, and cake.

The night before was sort of hard because I had a lot of decorations I still wanted to put up and presents to wrap (ie cover with blankets), and all he wanted was for me to stay with him. 9:30, 10, 10:30, on and on and on. Kevin was at the store getting a few last-minute things, so he couldn't help.  I knew that what my son needed more than streamers was love and attention (in fact, I could almost hear President Uchtdorf's voice in my head telling me that) . . . but I knew that he would appreciate the streamers a lot more the next morning than a bit of love and attention. Thankfully, he finally went to sleep so we could finish getting ready for the day.

And then . . . it was his birthday! We had streamers dangling right outside his bedroom door, so when he left his room it was the first thing he saw. "Oh," he said in a tone of happy yet subdued surprise. Then he saw his stuffed animals waiting to wish him happy birthday on the stairs. "Oh," he said again in that chipper voice.

And then, there were presents! As in years past, we used a combination of wrapping paper and blankets to hide the presents. (And since this year he got a few presents that might have been less exciting [new sheets, new socks, and new underwear], we made sure to put those in the most exciting wrapping paper. For the record, he is still excited he got those for his birthday.)

As a side note, my life got so much easier when I realized balloons on the ground were just as good a decoration  as balloons on the wall.

After opening presents (thanks, by the way, to grandparents, aunts, and uncles for making sure he opened fun things too!), it was breakfast time. While Joseph was eating breakfast I decided to get started on the cake before it got too hot to use the oven. By this point I had decided to make a smallish chocolate cake from cake mix, use the remaining batter to make some chocolate cupcakes, and then some cupcakes from yellow cake mix. That way we could still share cupcakes with friends at a potluck the next day.

At first, things were going well. Made the chocolate cake and cupcakes. Got the cupcakes out of the muffin tin and put the yellow cake batter in. Made the yellow cupcakes. Got them out of the oven and then tried to get the cupcakes out of the muffin tin. But I had forgotten to regrease it so they came out crumbly. I planned on texting a few neighbors to come over and eat them (and maybe have a mini party while they were in here), but Joseph headed out the door right then, so I followed him out with the plate in tow. When we went out there was maybe one other kid, but when I stepped back in for a minute to dry my hair (I had taken a shower sometime in the midst of all the cooking), I watched as about ten kids came out of nowhere and swarmed the plate. It was amazing. And hey, I didn't want those cupcakes.

But the cupcake drama was not yet finished. Earlier, Joseph had been nibbling on chocolate cupcakes, so I put the plate on top of the fridge. But I forgot about it there until I opened the freezer, which knocked the plate off balance and sent most of the cupcakes to the floor. If Joseph hadn't cried, I might have.

Anyway, other than that, it was a great birthday! Just a nice, regular, low-key day. After Kevin came home, we ate pasta for dinner, and then it was time for cake!

So, on Joseph's birthday last year, I made this cake for him.

And, although he didn't appreciate it so much on his birthday, nearly every day since he's told me about it.  So, even though I suggested other cakes, he ended up getting one like this for his 3rd birthday:

Why is it that when I'm doing things like spelling words with sprinkles, I hear the phrase "good, better, best" playing through my head? Also, how many bus cakes do you have to make in a year before they actually start looking better each time?

After a fun evening eating cake and non-melted ice cream (thanks, new fridge!), Joseph went to bed. "Will it be my birthday tomorrow?" (Or the next day, or the next day, or the next day.)

No, but most of the decorations are still up.

Joseph with a birthday blower

We sure like him.

The couch

Until I cleaned it out ten minutes ago, I think our couch operated as a Room of Requirement for our home. If we had really wanted something, we probably could have reached down and found it.

Except we never used it. So it was just a Vanishing Cabinet instead. One with lots and lots of hiding places.

I still remember the time about a year into our marriage that we were sitting watching a movie when Kevin reached down into the couch and pulled out a flattened Diet Coke can. Not from us. Or from anyone since we had acquired the couch.

Or the time there was a toy car there. Also not from us.

Anyway, I was looking for a dry erase marker and suspected it might be in the couch. I didn't find it, but I found these things instead:

-A baby toy
-a blue pen
-a black pen
-a purple pen (I thought I lost it in Relief Society more than two years ago. This is also weird because I have looked in that part of the couch before and never found a purple pen.)
-a red marker
-a blue scrunchie
-a white scrunchie
-a black hair thing
-an old cell phone
-two bobby pins
-another pen or two
-a medal
-a pretzel

The strangest thing is that some of these must have been missing for at least a while, but I know it hasn't been that long since I found a little ball in that part of the couch, and I didn't see any of this junk that time. At least, I thought it was that part of the couch. I also sort of feel like this couch has new hiding places each time I look. (Fyi, this isn't even the couch cushion part of the couch. It's some back flap that only opens up when the seats are reclined. So I don't even know how things got there.)

So where did I find the dry erase marker? In the other couch. Under a cushion I had already checked.

I think that just proves that our couches are magical.

"Why?" "Z."

As Joseph has made the transition into three-hood, he's started doing a few very three-ish things.

The first is the jokes. I don't know how long this one was going on before it finally hit -- he was telling jokes! Unfortunately, we've only told him lame jokes his entire life, so that's what we get in return.

For example, as I was putting him in his car seat, he said, "We're not in our car. We're in . . . Peter's car! We're in . . . Hudson's car! Is that funny?" And then he laughed hysterically.

I guess it beats knock-knock jokes.

The other one is all the "why" questions. "Why is there a car next to us? Why is it dinner time? Why does it get dark?" Why? Why? Why? And of course, no answer is going to satiate his curiosity. He's learning a lot, but it comes at the expense of his parents' sanity.

Anyway, yesterday I had an epiphany. I think he asked, "Why are you eating lunch?" "Why are you hungry?" and so on and so on. I gave some answer and he asked, "Why?"
And then, I said in an explanatory voice, "Z."
"Why?"
"Z."
"Why?"
"Z."
"Y?"
"Z."
"Y?"
"Q."
He then laughed and sang the ABC's. After he finished singing he went back to asking "Why?" but now it was a game to hear me say "Z" instead of some convoluted explanation. This trick will probably only work when he's in a good mood, but at least it's something.

Again, it beats knock-knock jokes. Well, maybe.

"I want the Africa song"

"This one is my favorite."

More words about our trip

I used up most of my pictures about the trip, but here are a few other things I remembered:

-It was rainy more than half the time. Perhaps if we had checked the weather forecast, we would have known that. But we didn't, or it changed by the time we got there, so we packed as if it would be sunny and warm. At one point while we were packing, we sort of asked each other, "Should we bring jackets?" And then we sort of responded to each other, "Nah. It's May." I guess we didn't really need them since of course there were jackets lying around, but it was funny how conscientious we were about not bringing them in the first place.

-Besides dealing with rain, we also dealt with sickness about half the time as well. It seemed like just about any time there was a chance for us to meet a new baby, we were sick enough that we decided it'd be a bad idea. And then the next day we'd be feeling better. Back and forth with the starts of colds and then the sudden disappearance and then a lot of unexplained crankiness from Joseph which then turned out to be caused by a sore throat or major congestion, on and on and on. The Saturday we were with my family, I woke up with a horrible sore throat and a nasty head cold. That evening, we were visiting family down in Lindon. I had sort of isolated myself on the couch with a book when my little cousin came up to me and started poking my face all over. It was fine until she stuck her fingers in my mouth. "Um, you're going to want to wash those because my mouth is kind of yucky," I told her. She looked at me for a moment and then stuck those same fingers back into her mouth. I never found out if she caught my cold or not. Hope not. Her mom had a baby the day before, after all.

-On our way back to Michigan, we flew Southwest. It was the first time in a long time either of us had flown Southwest, so we didn't realize that we should check in as soon as possible to get decent seats. By the time we remembered, we were at the back of Zone B or the front of Zone C. We were sort of counting people taking pity on us so that we could still sit together. On our flight to Chicago, we ended up boarding pretty early on because we had a small child. On the second flight, we stood off to the side while special people got to pre-board, when all of the sudden one of the officials pointed at us.

"You guys get to board now because pregnancy is a temporary disability, and he (pointing to Kevin) did it to you." Hard to argue with that.

-Of course, the hard thing about being first to board is that it means you are sitting still for longer, which is hard for a toddler. So we did everything we could to entertain Joseph including starting a bedtime routine for him. We first modeled it by putting one of his stuffed animals to bed. After pretending to brush its teeth, we asked Joseph if he wanted to read it a story. He nodded and pulled out a safety pamphlet. "Once upon a time there was a plane that wanted to crash into the water. And there was a man on the plane that wanted to get into the water. So the plane went into the water." There was just enough turbulence and strange whirring sounds coming from the plane that as we flew over Lake Michigan those words kept coming back to me over and over. But we made it fine.

-Oh, and speaking of turbulence . . . our flight from Detroit to Denver was insane! The seatbelt sign was on for all but the last hour of the flight. I dozed off enough to only be mildly aware of it, but I think it hit Kevin pretty hard. As for Joseph, it's hard to really mind stuff like that when a) you're on an airplane!!!! and b) you are busy watching Lightning McQueen. So he still loves to fly.

-One last story. The past few times I had gone home, I would chip away at Understanding the Book of Mormon by Grant Hardy. Since Duchesne is generally a little less eventful than Providence, I asked my mom to leave it at my grandma's house for us to pick up before heading to Duchesne. She left a lot of other books, but not that one since she couldn't find it. We still couldn't find it when we went to Providence, so I just read other stuff. Then, the day we got back to Ann Arbor, I decided to check the library catalog on a whim. And they had it! We had gone all the way to Utah to read a book when it was in Michigan the whole time. It was just like the Wizard of Oz, somehow.

. . . and that should be my last post about our Utah trip. Unless I remember other stories, which is doubtful at this point.

Utah Trip, Part 2

After saying good-bye to Kevin's family, we were off to Logan! On our way there, we had a few stops we had to make. After all, we were driving through the beautiful countryside where the cult classic Troll 2 was filmed. Why we've seen it, I'm still not sure. What we think of it, I'm still not sure. Can we recommend it? Not categorically. But nonetheless, we felt we owed it to the movie to stop by some of its sites. So we put the addresses into the GPS, and spent about 20 minutes total visiting its hallowed ground. First stop was the farmhouse where most of the action occurred.

And what it looked like in person:

It got torn down.

As we were driving through the appropriate scenery, I tried to reenact this scene with Joseph:

But it didn't quite work.

Man, though, that was a pretty drive. I guess most anywhere is going to look pretty when it gets a few inches of rain, but those canyons and mountains were just shimmering.

My camera doesn't really have "shimmer" setting, I guess. Especially not at 70 mph.

We stopped by Porterville to see the old chapel where much of the movie was set,

This isn't quite what it looked like when it was filmed 25 years ago

stopped by my aunt's house in Hooper, and then made it to my parents' house!

The next day, we turned around and headed south to spend the day in Provo with sisters and BYU faculty. Since we weren't sure if we'd see Jennie or not, we decided to decorate her door with heartfelt compliments (the "you smell better than the bus when the heater turns on" kind since that's the only kind I really know how to do).

Uzbekistani refugee -- Joseph style

Uzbekistani refugee -- Derek style

Attacking Jennie's door with compliments and goldfish snacks

We did end up seeing Jennie and got to eat dinner with her! As a funny side note, we always always always order water when we go to restaurants. So when Jennie just said first thing to the waiter that "We're all getting water," she was probably making a well-educated guess. But this was Brick Oven! There was root beer! So we didn't end up getting water. Except for her.

And then, we did lots of fun things that have no photographic evidence! But here are the things that do:

Like father-in-law, like son-in-law

From Kaylie's cute baby shower

6 weeks apart

At the Logan River

Large-scale Pooh sticks

It . . . wasn't really that warm a lot of the days we were there. I think some of those clouds deposited snow on the mountains.

Yep, there's some snow. From about February to May I don't think there was any snow up there on Little Baldy. Speaking of Little Baldy, I just read that Disney is making a remake of "Night on Bald Mountain" because they are desperate. I think some people should hurry and make "Night on Little Baldy" because it's bound to be better. And it's not that hard of a walk to the top.

After two wonderful weeks with family, it was time to return back to Michigan.

But the memories remain.