You guys, today the high is in the 70s and I am so happy! Living in a house without AC has really changed me. Summer used to be my happy time. Now I'm just wondering what's taking winter so long. When we visited Utah two weeks ago, I enlisted my brother Tim to find a portable AC unit on KSL that we could put our bedroom to have one place of refuge in the house. That's really helped, but I'm still having a hard time getting our place all unpacked and put together when our thermostat in the rest of the house constantly reads "87." Washington heat wave be gone!
Ok, onto some pictures from our fun family reunion in Idaho. My friend Tori recently said she refers to vacations with kids as "work trips," and that's the most accurate description I've ever heard haha. Now that all my siblings have kids or are pregnant, we should have called this "Haines Family Work Trip, 2021."
My blog pictures usually load backwards, so I'll label these as they come, even though the trip really started with a lake day and ended with Yellowstone.
On our day in Yellowstone, we started with a hike around some hot pots. Jack and Asher thought it was so cool to see the different colors of mud and the smelly steam. This short hike had a great view from the top, too.
^^I wish you could see the waterfall behind us, but it was kind of hard to get a good picture at this angle. This was the longest hike we did. It was pretty short, but Jack made me and Jared carry him on our shoulder the whole way back up a series of steep switchbacks.
^^Dad life.
^^The whole group, including Jordan's bum.
^^I miss having hair long enough to put in a ponytail. I'm having haircut regrets!!!
^^Tim and Abby going hard on the swinging game, just like Jack likes it.
^^We also spent a day on the water at Island Park. The boys mostly loved playing on the beach, and we all took turns on a little rental boat. I must be old/a parent now, because tubing doesn't do it for me like it used to. I like the excuse of going with Jack so I can get a guaranteed smooth ride instead of flying off and getting a lake enema. (Yes that has happened to me.)
^^Jack had fun his first time on the boat, but the second time he had missed his nap and kept getting unexpected waves of water to the face.
^^Jack and Cole. Jack was in cousin heaven all trip. It's so fun having Cole old enough to play with Jack and Asher now. Next time the two younger girls will be old enough to play with them, too.
^^We got rained out from doing an evening campfire, so we put a solar lantern under the covered patio and Dad led campfire songs around it, and then Peter helped us make smores with his welding torch haha. Jack loved the campfire songs. He couldn't stay in his seat--he kept getting up to stand in the middle of the circle and do dance moves. Love that lil' bubs.
Until next Work Trip! We're in charge of the reunion two years from now. We'll probably keep it simple since most of us will probably have little babies around that time. One benefit of all of my siblings having kids at the same time is we'll all be done having kids around the same time too, and then the kids can all grow up together and enjoy more involved reunions when they all become teenagers at the same time. We've got a fun life ahead of us!
