Endings and Beginnings

It's all starting to run together a bit here. The end of summer was a swirling vortex that both took forever and was over in a blink. I'm just going to smash it all in here in one final summer end/school start/Romney turned 13 post.

A treat for mommy!

After that whirlwind week of theater in St. George I made it home just in time to go get pedicures with dear friends Becca, Elyse and Lynnette. I'm in the light blue flip flops. My poor dry feet loved that very very much.

Also I had to say goodbye to my friend Jeannie! Our sons are the same age and when I met her when they were kindergarteners I had this feeling that we were going to be friends. I was right. When our boys had the same 1st grade teacher we started to get to know each other and had many years of watching each others' kids, us going to her for hair appointments, going to movies and lunches and pedicures. I really love her. She and her family moved to Florida for a big job change and it's a little weird that she's not right around the corner any more to pop by with her doggie. We enjoyed an awesome brunch at a little place downtown called the White Horse.

Okay and you may officially call us batty-pants. Earlier in the summer we found out that a dear friend would be performing in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera HMS Pinafore, which I had never seen. I have such a soft spot for G&S because my mom loved them so much and really educated us on her favorites. I still feel like I'm expressing my love for my mom and processing her passing by seeing musicals and thinking of her. This little production was rather a silly version of the play, but that didn't mean the singing wasn't wonderful. We went on the Monday after we got home - it seemed reasonable back when I bought the tickets but when I reminded my family of the event I really was expecting groans since we had returned so recently from our big drama trip. Nope. My girls were so excited to go and my boys were so excited to not go. At least everyone is predictable! The show was hilarious if sparsely attended.

We of course fit in another trip to the zoo...I mean, what else would we want to do?

Midway through August our school hosted a back-to-school night, which is really out of tradition for how they usually do it. Usually it happens during the first week of school but this year we had this big BBQ outside and it was much more of an open-house. My big kids had fun coming and seeing favorite teachers from previous years, including their 4th grade teacher, who is retiring this year.

Emma is in 4th grade this year, but she didn't get Mrs. Farrell like the other two did. She got our school's new teacher, Mr. Mitchell. He is a terrific addition to our school and Emma is doing so great in his class.

Oh man this is all feeling awfully random. I'm just going to go with it though. After all, it's Sunday night at like 10pm and I feel like if I don't finish blogging the summer before Halloween, I'm never going to recover. Let the random topics continue.

So Romney turned 13!!! Yay sweet Romney! She is SO AWESOME. She is so lovely, funny, loves theater so much, is really building some great friendships, and grew so much over the summer. You are NEVER going to believe what she wanted to do for her birthday. So....she loved Newsies so much in July that she decided that that was the single thing she wanted to do for her birthday. Go see it again. And it just so happened that Hale Theater opened up an additional matinee the last weekend of summer, the weekend before her birthday. And I found out about this early enough that I got her two tickets on the front row. She invited her fellow theater-loving friend (who maybe knew the lyrics a little too well...) and they had a great time seeing it again. I was a little sad I wasn't seeing it too but since the tickets were twice the price for me I thought it would be best to just let them have a great time together.

That same weekend we had a visit from the St. Georgians - I have to say that I have no recollection as to why at this point. Maybe just a last hurrah? I can't remember. 

 Someday I'm going to make a book of all the photos taken just at this spot over the years - we started with just one or two kids, little toddlers climbing on this statue

One of our other activities for the weekend was going up to fan day at the Utes Stadium. It was pretty crazy, so packed with people. We got some mediocre snow cones and played a couple of carnival-type games, but the real fun was the people watching and especially getting to walk out onto the field. Man was that spectacular, to see the stadium from the point of view of the turf. What a sight.

And then, it came. The big day. The first day of school. I was so happy and so sad at the same time. 

Chase started his sophomore year at West:

Romney was off to 8th Grade at Clayton:

And Emma made it to the 4th grade:

We took a few obligatory first-morning pictures:

The kids all seemed to have a great day and were excited. Well, maybe not Chase so much. He is not a super fan of school. I know he likes the social side and he's involved this year in a dance crew (!!!!) as well as in A'cappella. Every day when you ask him how school is he mostly grunts and says boring. But you know I'm sure he'll warm up to it. In about June of 2021.

Tuesday was Romney's actual birthday and we had the grandparents over for dinner. At the last minute we decided to invite a few of Romney's friends and I'm so glad we did because they just had a big old massive giggle fest in the living room while the aged folks hung out on the back porch and talked and enjoyed the evening air.

I made a very sad-looking lopsided birthday cake. It was all I could muster.

Romney has some seriously sweet friends.

So yeah I guess that's it! Summer ended, like it does every year, though it often feels like it won't. And school started, no matter how much some kids dreaded it and some kids yearned for it. It's all feeling a little anticlimactic at the moment - like that Shel Silverstein poem:

Here comes summer,

Here comes summer,

Chirping robin, budding rose.

Here comes summer,

Here comes summer,

Gentle showers, summer clothes.

Here comes summer,

Here comes summer—

Whoosh—shiver—there it goes.

Except for the times when it feels like it won't end. But then, whoosh, it does!!

August Adventures, Namely Theatrical in Nature

I know, I already posted a picture of the boys heading out on their trip to Yellowstone, but I thought I'd include it again as a preface to the adventure that the girls and I went on at the same time.

The cute boys were off to canoe Yellowstone lake and to ponder during their entire trip if they really wanted to keep doing this every year or maybe switch it up a bit next year. Their first couple of years were such great adventures and they learned so much but I know that this year felt a little more arduous and maybe even a little hum-drum, sad to say. I know they loved their time together and wish that even more Preslar family could join them, but I imagine they will try for a new destination this year. It wasn't helped by the fact that poor Troy was suffering with double hernias and wasn't scheduled for surgery until Labor Day so it was extra challenging and kind of painful too for him this year. Luckily he has this son who seems to be blossoming in muscles lately and who proved to be both willing and helpful. This is new territory and we're enjoying it a lot. They had a great time.

In the meantime, I took the girls on an epic theatrical adventure. Early in the spring I had seen advertisements for Tuacahn, a huge outdoor theater near Snow Canyon in St. George. They put on three plays every year, and this year they were Cinderella, Matilda and The Prince of Egypt. I desperately wanted to take the girls to see them. I'm grateful to Troy who was supportive of us looking into tickets and found that we could get a very good deal on the shows if we went during the week and didn't sit front and center. 

We made our plans and were happy to find that the best days for the St. George Romneys to have us were the same days that Troy and Chase would be out of town. Peter was even able to join us for two of the plays with his girls. I was not super excited that the only time that would work out was in the dead of August, when St. George is just blisteringly hot, but that's when it worked so that's when we went. 

We had been planning to head south on Tuesday morning, see the three plays on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, but then we found out that Siena and Cara were involved in a Children's Theater production of Peter Pan on Monday night, so we just decided to add one more play to the schedule and go down a day early. So that made four plays in four days. And then....Peter told me he could get half-price tickets to the Shakespeare festival and there was a Thursday matinee of Big River - a retelling of Huckleberry Finn. It's so wonderful. We decided to go for it. My girls jumped for joy when I mentioned it to them.

I know that this kind of trip would definitely not be for everyone, even just seeing the three Tuachan plays in three nights would be a bit much for many folks, and I'm pretty sure my husband and son were more than happy to have no part of this trip. And then you add in an extra play on Monday night. And THEN you add in one more musical on the same day as another one...could be torture for some. But not me. And you wouldn't believe it but not my girls either. They absolutely loved every minute. Not once did they complain about sitting too long or not wanting to watch another one - nothing. They just loved it. I'm so so grateful we have this shared love.

Here we are on Monday night just after the Peter Pan performance. Siena was an adorable TinkerBell and Cara played the cutest little Lost Boy. It really was a sweet performance. Those girls can really sing. I wish I had nabbed a photo of the stage but somehow I missed that. I enjoyed having little Iva sit on my lap for the show. 

We decided to spend the blazing hot St. George days sleeping in and going to swimming pools. We hit the city pool for a few hours on Tuesday before getting ready for Cinderella.

I don't know quite how to describe how miserably hot it was! We chugged water and sat there and sweat all night long. And the shows didn't even start until 8:00 at night! It was sauna-level hot. I'm glad to say though that my girls just handled it. We kind of laughed about it, and it just was what it was and so worth it!

Here we are, making our way up the theater steps for the first night:

Although my tickets were priced so that I couldn't sit in the lower center section, I COULD sit in the lower right section - so we were down very close! It was kind of funny, I must have been slightly out of my mind when I got the tickets because both the first two nights we had all the tickets in a row plus one lonely ticket in the row ahead. I must have done that on purpose, probably because there weren't enough together or something, but I had forgotten and was quite surprised to find that I would not be sitting by my family the first two nights! Luckily I was just ahead of them and it was fine. When we finally got seated I made a happy discovery, that one of my companions from my LDS mission in Korea was sitting like two rows behind us! It was such a treat to see her and meet her sweet husband and son. They had already seen The Prince of Egypt and were going to be there Tuesday and Wednesday nights with us. They are as big of theater-junkies as we are. Maybe even more because I think they actually participate in their local theater in Ogden. Anyway, that was a super fun treat.

The girls had fun getting dressed up and were so excited for the show:

Here's the Cinderella stage:

And what do I say about Cinderella? I mean, I think it's still my favorite fairy tale, and getting to know the music and see the incredible effects was just jaw dropping and such a thrill. Some of our favorite moments were for sure the absolutely magical transformations for both the Fairy Godmother and Cinderella - you couldn't really even catch how their costume changes happened, right there on stage, transforming clothing and hair and everything. There was an expanding pumpkin and a lit carriage and fireworks - The Fairy Godmother flew across the audience, going right over our heads, and she gave Emma a special wink and a little wave. So fun! I wish I could have seen it again. It was delightful.

Well, Wednesday was the day that Romney started coming down with a cold. The poor poor girl felt awful. She rested as much as she could, and she really rallied every night for the plays and even felt well enough to go on a few outings but my poor poor daughter felt awful. By Wednesday night we were packing hard candies for her to suck on and lots of advil and cold drinks and oh my gosh the poor thing. That day during the day Sheri did her magical thing where so put together an outing for us to a completely new place we had never even heard of. There is this little town called Veyo and they have this public pool that is near a natural spring. It looks kind of divey from the outside but it was a great little pool and they served great pool food. Really good fries and shakes. Exactly what I need when I'm hanging out in a swimming suit. The most fun thing about the pool is that when they were building it they included in the pool tiling dozen of these little resin tiles with animals in them - real spiders, tiny snakes, fish, shells, starfish - all perfectly preserved in the tiles. It was so fun to swim around and hunt for them. Fun unless you were in charge of Sam who loves to swim and acts like he's trying to drown himself the whole time you're with him. You have to haul him out of the water to take breaths. 

After that he was pretty pooped:

I didn't really catch any photos of Matilda - we really weren't supposed to be taking pictures of the stage I found out. (Whoops, sorry Cinderella!) This time I was way up on the 2nd row, with my family right behind me. We were really close. That had some fun advantages like really being able to see actor's faces and catch those details, but also we missed a wide scope of the whole stage. Romney was miserable, but loved Matilda so much. I had been pretty skeptical - I had tried to listen to the music a little before and it just seemed really weird. But then seeing the whole show together made it come alive and we loved it. It was so funny. The best part of the show was The Trunchbowl - a mean mean principal woman, played by a man - he was amazing. Funny. Spit slightly on the front row patrons. 

Romney felt so bad by the end of it that Peter called his friend who was in town to come over and they gave her a priesthood blessing. I was so grateful for that. She slept well and was able to function much better the next day.

The week was racing by! We headed up to Cedar City on Thursday around lunch time and caught a matinee of Big River. It was great to talk with the girls about the questions posed in Huckleberry Finn, to talk about race and how we treat people. The music was great. And we bought too many Shakespeare Festival tarts. I forgot that only Peter and I like those.

Funny enough, guess who was sitting in the row behind us!!

Yep, my mission friend and her family were also hitting up one last play. What a sweet family.

After Big River we decided we needed some shaved ice big time. We marveled at the size of these delicious monsters but had no trouble downing them:

Finally we headed out for our final play, The Prince of Egypt. This time it was just me and Romney and Emma. We stopped for some silly photos:

And some cute ones too:

This time the back of the stage was just open to the desert mountain walls. It was amazing. We sat in the center section, much higher up, and it was a great night to choose those seats because The Prince of Egypt was just epic. So amazing. I was so glad to have a sweeping view of the whole stage because there was so much to see. Water effects, pyrotechnics, amazing sets and costumes. What a sweet way to tell the story of Moses. I loved it! I loved being with my girls, I loved sharing this week with them. I wish I could convey how cool these plays are and I super wish I could see them all again. Instead, we made a playlist of Cinderella, Matilda, Big River and The Prince of Egypt. We added Newsies from earlier in the summer, and some Pirates of Penzance because we saw that right before school started. And we listen to this playlist constantly. Even now, in October. We can't stop!

This trip is going to be absolutely unforgettable forever. I'm so very grateful we got to do it, that Romney survived her cold, even though she was coughing for weeks afterward. I'm so grateful for wonderful theater and music and all that it brings to my life.