For starters, on Tuesday the 27th, I took Skippidy out for an afternoon date - one of her Christmas presents was to go see a movie with me. She really wanted to see the animated movie Trolls. It ended up being quite the adventure because we had trouble actually finding a theater that was still playing the movie. I didn't think it was that old. We ended up driving both as far north as Bountiful and as far south as Sandy - LONG DAY. And it ended up being too much time away from home, but Skippidy absolutely loved the movie, so that was a good thing.
Also, as I wasn't quite ready to let go of Christmas, the next day I dragged our kids on a little outing to go see the cool displays and scavenger hunt at the Grand America Hotel. The kids enjoyed it more than I expected, and we also for the first time popped into the toy store in the hotel that is located just at the exit of the scavenger hunt route. It was pretty amazing and we had a fun time exploring.
It was just the next weekend that Troy and I celebrated our 19th anniversary. Although we took no pictures to prove it, Troy and I had a lovely celebration. I arranged to send the kids off to spend the night with friends while Troy and I went up to Midway and enjoyed a stay at the Homestead resort - we loved going for a swim in the crater and enjoying the mineral pool hot tub. Seeing as how it was still Christmas break, a Friday night, and the night before New Years, it was really rather packed at the resort. There's an attraction there called the ice castles - an incredible display of towers and tunnels and slides all made of ice. It draws quite the crowd. Troy and I couldn't even get tickets, and I'm actually glad about that. We would have been shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other people, and what we really wanted was alone time. It was pretty funny - we got in the car to head to town to find a place to eat dinner. Everywhere we looked was also crowded. We cruised up and down the main street of Heber trying to find something a little less busy. We found a tiny little Chinese food joint with pretty much no one there. You'd think that would have been a warning of some kind about the quality of the food, but we didn't care. The restaurant was silent, and we enjoyed a very delicious meal of sweet and sour pork and General Tao's chicken. Couldn't have enjoyed it more. We sat laughing at how happy we were to be all alone in that tiny little dive.
Can't believe its been 19 years.
Here's something we enjoyed doing: snuggles by the fire with a movie on. That's always good.
A week after Christmas we found ourselves with a valley full of fresh snow, so we pulled on our snow gear and headed to my dad's house where we generally have a really good time sledding. This time we decided to make a jump - remind me never to do that again. Or if we do, remind me to never go off of it myself again. OUCH. I didn't think one tiny little jump could make me take off like it did, and with my bulk, I had quite the landing. The jump did produce, however, some pretty awesome pictures of the kids.
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| Best Picture Ever. Skippidy catching air. |
The kids have mentioned going ice skating many times - I was kind of dreading going mostly because Skippidy has never been before and I didn't think it would go very well. I dreaded the idea of her clinging to me while we both fell repeatedly on that rock-hard ice. But my friend Ruth invited us to join them and it turned out to be a great afternoon. Everyone had a really good time, including Skippidy, who was actually a lot more steady than I thought she'd be.
Another event that took place after Christmas was the most wonderful reunion of old friends from our neighborhood who all moved away about 10 years ago - this is my friend Amie, who is one of those types of friends that you remain full-heartedly close to no matter how many years go by. I just adore her, and it was wonderful to reconnect and reunite even for an evening.
We were celebrating the 40th birthday of our other friend Marjorie, and her husband treated us to quite the fancy meal at this lovely little Italian spot down town. Many people were in from the west coast as well as the east coast - we felt like we were running with quite the high society. We kind of were. I wish we could do that once a year at least.
As the vacation began to wind to a close, we all got a little restless and cabin-fevery. We had many kids come over to hang out (I'm becoming aware that it's no longer very cool for me to use the phrase 'play date'). But on one empty day I hauled all the kids into the car, went for a quick visit to my mom, Oma, which was very brief as she was very sleepy and didn't seem to know who any of us were. Sad. That's a topic for another post.
After that we continued to head south until we made it to the campus of BYU where there is a very cool (and free!) museum called the Bean Museum. Skippidy thought we were going to go see various displays of beans, I kid you not. Instead, there is a huge collection of taxidermied animals. It's slightly weird but also pretty cool. I mean, seriously, an elephant. Also giraffes, lions, hippos and tons of other animals. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon.
I'm not going to pretend like the kids were excited to go back to school, but even they have to admit that getting back to a regular schedule and seeing people and getting out of the house was good. I don't know, maybe they don't have to. But I sure was ready. Oh...I forgot to mention New Years Eve! Guess what we did? NOTHING. It was actually pretty awesome. It was on a Saturday night with regular church meetings the next day, and no one, not ourselves and not our neighbors, felt like doing anything. So, we ordered pizza, invited my dad over, and watched Return of the King. Sometimes I really long for company and getting together but this made for a great night. Happy New Year!
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