Utah!

 

(^^Spent a full day hiking my way through every trailhead from Orem down to Payson, trying to find my favorite trail systems for when it comes time to job/house hunt in the next year or two--this pretty one is in Salem.)

We've had a wonderful, sleep-deprived week in Utah! (Our kiddos are notoriously terrible travel sleepers.) Our trip started with my Grandma Roper's family reunion at a farm in Cornish, UT. 

The reunion was all kinds of fun, per usual. Alice took a nap outside under a tree and this was her face when she woke up.

^^One of the favorite parts of the reunion is always this big slip n' slide. Everyone usually spends the morning going down the slip n slide and the afternoon at a little pond on the farm, filled with kayaks and zip lines and other good stuff. In between we chat and eat. It's always one of our top 3 favorite days of the year, easily. 

^^I made an off-handed comment to Jack about doing the 2-hour ride home with Grandma and Grandpa and he was like YES. And we were like, PRAISE. And now for a big dump of Utah pictures with little to no context:

^^Everyone was pleased when Nana came to dinner, and Alice even sat on her lap for a bit. Alice is going through a strong "stranger danger" phase so it was nice to capture this happy "pat-a-cake" moment of her with my dear grandmother. 

^^Now that I've lived a fair few places over the past 10 years, I am shocked to come back to Utah and realize that this gorgeous mountain view was the backdrop to my childhood. Stunning.

Here is Jared winning me a prize on our Lagoon date by hanging from a bar for over a minute. He was very proud of himself for breaking into the Top 2 leaderboard:

Jared signed Jack up for a two-day bowling camp at BYU. We went bowling together after he finished and felt like a real family having a bowling day .

We had a Big Springs picnic with grandma and grandpa while Jared drove down to Arizona with his dad to visit his old house where he grew up. The boys:

And the girls:

Lots of backyard water play this week:

Jared and I walked through a few model homes in Salem just for fun. Jared has a dream floor plan (it's the one that's really popular in Utah right now--vaulted main area with a loft overhead. Master bedroom and office on main, kids bedrooms upstairs, unfinished basement). It's *almost* within our price range if we were to buy way down in Salem. Unfortunately our favorite part of the valley is more north up near Dry Canyon, so we're going to have to weigh if dream location or dream home is more important to us when the time comes. (So far it seems dream location is more important to me, but dream home is more important to Jared. I see some professional-level compromising at some point in our future, but not for a few years.) 

^^Alice's face seeing me when I came home after spending a full day away hiking. This baby is the best baby.