More Cousin Surprises

A few weeks ago I found out that my brother Adam and his family were planning to come from Seattle to Salt Lake over their spring break. I was delighted. I knew it was partly because Adam had yet to visit my mom in her new cottage. (By the way, I am well aware that mom is not actually living in a cottage, but I prefer that word infinitely to 'facility' or even 'home.' 'Cottages' is just so much more cozy. I will also accept Village.) Anyway, Adam wanted to come see her and spend some time here and I was so happy at the thought of getting to see them this spring.

We did have a few lovely outings together - my favorite was the evening we met up at Cafe Rio at Kimball Junction and ate dinner together, then discovered a great walking path around a bird sanctuary right near by. It was a cool and rainy evening but that didn't stop us from strolling along together and getting caught out in the most delicious sunset. Due to the misty air the entire evening was turned absolutely tangerine and gold by the setting sun. It was pretty magical. And of course after that we went out for ice cream, so really, it was a perfect night.

We got to keep Smith for a sleepover one night - he's such a good kid and he and Cap are really good buddies. It seems like those fussy challenging years of love/hate, having issues, best-friends-when-not-irritated times are over. They just hang out and have a great time together.

The last weekend they were here I was feeling bummed that Peter and Sheri weren't able to come up and see them too - I jokingly sent them a text saying HEY just drive up late Friday night and leave late Saturday night! THAT's not at ALL unreasonable. Then I went ahead and planned a dinner for Adam and his family as well as my sister and dad, feeling sad that we'd miss Peter. I saw a couple of funny things on Instagram from Sheri that I couldn't figure out - she was talking about having a sleepover someplace and I couldn't figure out where they were. Then I checked Instagram again later and saw they had posted another picture and this time I knew EXACTLY where they were: THE ZOO!! SURPRISE!!! They were in SLC. They had done exactly as I had suggested and squashed a trip north in the 30 hour period they had free; the Instagram pictures of the sleepover were at my sister's house! (You'd think I'd recognize it...) It was our turn for a total and complete surprise - my girls were at Girl Scouts that afternoon when they were done at the zoo, and I had Sheri bring her girls to the meeting where they not only completely shocked Bitty and Skip, but stayed on to help make posters for an upcoming food drive.

Here are Peter and Sheri's girls crashing the Girl Scout activity

It was great fun, and I loved having all those cousins at my house for an evening. We tried really hard to get a good picture of all of them but shocker...had a really hard time getting anyone to hold still and look at the camera.