We've got a picture heavy post this week, so I'll try and save most of my words for the captions. It was a big, wonderful week! Jared's workload has been picking WAY up since summer started. In a way that's good. His first few months here he spent a lot of his time at work kind of twiddling his thumbs and seeing if there were any interesting youtube videos on his feed. Now he's booked and busy, which is I'm sure great for his brain and for showing his higher ups how valuable he is, but not great for him getting home at a reasonable time. He always leaves for work sometime between 6-6:30 in the morning, and now he's almost always getting home around 6-6:30 in the evening. It's a full 12 hours gone, and even though our kids are wonderful and cute and fun, I am getting pretty burned out on the caregiving side of things this summer. Alice at age 2 is everything--so cute, so quirky, so fun. As she gains more communication skills, she and Jack are playing together more and more. With that, they are also having more conflicts and sibling rivalry. It's a worthy trade off. Aaand I'm still exhausted.
It doesn't help that their bedtimes have creeped later and later as summer has gone on, to the point that regardless of when we start bedtime, Jack rarely falls asleep before 10 p.m., meaning Jared and I get really no time alone or together in the evenings. Even though this has meant I can get a decent hour of alone time to compose myself in the mornings before the kids wake up. It isn't really worth it. So we are thinking on trying to do a hard reset on the kids' schedules. Having them up before Jared leaves in the mornings so he can see them and do breakfast, and so they can fall asleep much earlier in the evenings and give us a solid block of time then. This might big-time backfire and leave us filled with regrets. But evenings have been hard enough that we're ready to try it. For the first time at age 7, Jack has really developed the ability to be sucked into a good book. This helps on the more difficult mornings. If I can hurry and check him out a library book on my Libby app and load it onto my Kindle for him, often that will buy me an hour in the morning to focus on Alice and breakfast.
After four long, exhausting parenting days, Jared got Friday off for the 4th of July, and my parents came to babysit on Saturday so Jared and I could go out on a date for our 12-year anniversary. We had a full and wonderful weekend. Let's get to the pictures:
^^July 4th dinner was spent at Tim and Abby's home. They are watching a neighbor's pet tortoise right now and it was everything. It mostly hid under a tree the whole time. I wouldn't mind a pet tortoise someday.
^^For the first year ever, both of the kids kind of knew what was going on with the fireworks and weren't scared, and it was magic. We all brought a dish to shard and Tim made pulled pork sandwiches. 10/10.
^^Our kids getting to know their cousins and aunts and uncles really well and building relationships with them is everything.
^^We finished our evening watching fireworks explode around their neighborhood, and then after we put the kids to bed we watched thousands of fireworks explode across the valley from the spectacular view out our bedroom window.
^^Lots of trips to the Butterfly Museum and Lehi Family Park to save my sanity this week. Even if we didn't have any family here, I would still feel so supported in my Mom life in Utah just having all these wonderful parks at our fingertips on the hardest days. Also, Alice is still going strong in her "smear whatever product I can find all over my hair" stage. We're having zero regrets about chopping her hair. It is so cute and so much easier to manage when she does smear hand soap all over it several times a week like so.
^^First family trip to the Macey's near our house for Kong Kones. A true Utah Valley institution.
^^The morning of July 4th, we convinced Chris and Caitlin to join us at the new park and beach at American Fork boat ramp for a beachy morning with the kids. We brought our paddleboard and shade canopy. They brought their kayaks. The kids and adults had a blast. We love that Utah Lake gets a lot of flack because it means less crowds when we go. Long live Utah Lake and its bad reputation <3
^^Saturday morning, after the 4th, the kids woke up GRUMPY. Somewhat on a whim we ended up throwing them in the car so we wouldn't have to deal with the grumpiness at home, and we drove to Lagoon to get another visit our of our season passes we got for Christmas. This was the right choice. Everyone else must've been sleeping in after the 4th festivities, because there were no lines at all for our first hour there, and tiny lines for the next hour. We went on Rattlesnake Rapids 3 times in a row without even having to get off the ride. It was amazing. The kids had a blast too. Alice kept saying, "I wuv Wagoon! This is fun. Best day ever!"
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^^A rogue picture off Jared's phone of our reunion day at Lava Hot Springs.
^^Anniversary Date!! We started off with dinner at Sauce Boss in Draper. It's an American Southern restaurant with delicious food. Reminded us of our time living in Georgia. We had cornbread and wings, shrimp and grits, collard greens and yams, blackened pork chops, and the most incredible red drink made with hibiscus flowers, pineapple juice, lemon, and ginger. The ambiance is a little bit "strip mall." I'd love to get my hands on it and give it a cozy southern ambiance, but the food and service were incredible enough that we hardly cared.
After dinner, we used our Get Out Passes for a free stop at the Plunj in Draper. It's a nordic-style bathhouse where you reserve your own room and go back and forth between the sauna and cold plunge for an hour. SO fun. What an incredible, different type of date experience. It reminded us of our anniversary last year spent at Post Hotel in Leavenworth, with its beautiful pool and many saunas and hot/cold rooms. Jared and I have never really braved a cold plunge before. It was fun to get in further and further each time and then have the sauna to run back to when we came out with screaming brain freezes each time. We felt incredible afterward. So, so fun. And our kids had a blast playing playdough and magnatiles with Grandma and Grandpa while we were gone. It's been a ride of 12 years together! We toughed our way through a lot of really hard situations during our first decade together, and it feels good to have landed in Utah with a little more stability in our lives. Love you Jare.
