Simpleton Pleasures

We made it home to Washington after a wonderful family reunion in Bear Lake! It's getting late and we drove all through the night last night so I'll be brief and then post more of the family pictures next week.

^^This is the only pic I have on my computer now but there are clearer ones I'll post next week.

^^Grandma and Grandpa's "Grampfire" service was lots of fun

^^Walking the boardwalk by the lake

^^Jack's favorite part of the trip was "playing with cousins." He loves them all so much.

^^Alice napping on my brother Jordan melted my heart after a morning mishap

^^Pretty much every "itinerary" item me and Jared planned had a hiccup, which caught us off-guard since we've done this exact itinerary probably half a dozen times without a hitch in the past, but everyone still had a good time.

^^Peter lighting the birthday cake candles for all our late July birthdays

^^"Human pinata" where Jared ran around and the cousins tried to grab candy glue-dotted to his shirt.

^^Alice and Jack playing together after the cousins had all left.

^^Alice saying goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa. Other than the kids' turbulent sleep, they were in their element with so many family members to play with and love on them. Alice had an accidental peanut encounter on our way out the door to drive home so we stayed an extra hour until the benadryl kicked in and we were certain the epi pen wouldn't be required (thank goodness it was a very minor exposure so her only symptom was hives this time). We drove through the night again because it is SO much easier to have the kids sleep most of the drive. And now we are missing our family but it is good to be home.

Some bonus pictures from the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point:

Haines Reunion 2023

(^^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.

Utah!

We are enjoying some wonderful time with family in Utah! We are here for two reunions and some summer fun. I'll write about the reunions in the next couple of posts, but I wanted to post about our 10th anniversary and the 4th of July before I forget.

Our 10-year Anniversary was on July 6. Jared's mom came up to watch the kids in the afternoon, and we had her bring her paddle board so we could have a lil paddle board date on two of the pretty lakes close to our house: Roesiger and Bosworth. This has been a Washington bucket list item for a while. The lakes here are gorgeous. One of the lakes is a 10-minute drive from our house, which has us considering an inflatable paddle board purchase. In theory it seems like it could be dreamy to wake up early and watch the sun rise from the middle of the lake before heading back and starting my day with the kids. In theory.

When we got home it was time to get everything packed into our car and drive 14 hours down to Utah. So, maybe not the most extravagant of 10-year anniversaries, but we had a lot of fun together and will be doing some sort of trip soonish to celebrate. If we didn't have a nursing baby we would have done a bigger trip on our anniversary, but with the timing, the plan is now a shorter trip once Alice is weaned or nearly weaned. The main goal this week was to celebrate a wonderful decade together, and we really did. I won't get too sappy here but I did a lot of happy crying the day before our anniversary writing out all the things I love about Jared. He really is a special guy. Got me a great catch 10 years ago and I feel very lucky and happy about the life we've created together.

We reflected on our last decade together and talked about what we want our next 10 years together to look like. We realized that these next 10 years will be the ONLY decade of having all our kids living at home for the entire decade. It was wild to realize that even though we're in the thick of parenting littles right now and it truly doesn't seem like there is an end in sight, there's only one more decade of being in the absolute thick of it. And then in the next decade kids will start to move out and there will be many more decades of Laura-Jared time after that. It feels in many ways like these coming years will be the prime years of our family life, and we really want to appreciate and enjoy them. So instead of making big goals for things we want to accomplish before our 20-year anniversary, we settled into the idea of finding a job and a home in Utah in a few years, and then being really present and enjoying our family. What a wonderful time of life.

Now for the 4th of July! It started out like this:

And continued like this:

And then ended like this:

We spent the afternoon of the 4th at Grandma Lambert's house, enjoying a hot dog lunch and playing at her neighborhood lake. It was so much fun and felt like a "real" fourth of July with yummy food, some water play, and time with family. Alice wasn't feeling too well so we tried to head home at a decent hour to get her to sleep:

And after she was in bed we put off a few little fireworks. 5-year-old Jack's favorite part of the evening was poppers and sparklers so I'm glad we didn't spring for anything too big. Especially since our small town goes absolutely NUTS on the 4th. We've only ever really celebrated the 4th in dry locations, so maybe this is the norm in lots of states, but we've never experienced any firework culture quite this robust until we moved to our rural town in Washington. Aerials everywhere. And not just a few per house. We're talking hour-long aerial shows happening at multiple houses on every street near us. The sky exploded in color all around us for a good 2-3 hours. Our next door neighbor and our neighbor across the street both had literal truckbeds completely full to overflowing with enormous fireworks. Our next door neighbor either tampered with his or got a defective batch because there were several aerial fireworks that exploded on the ground instead of in the air, so that was terrifying and the point at which we decided to head in for the night.

10th Anniversary + July 4th

It's going to be an exciting week! Of course we've got the 4th of July tomorrow--always lovely to celebrate now that we live near family and Jared is no longer in his training years. For Jared's 7 years of medical training we were either living in a country that didn't celebrate, or living on the opposite side of the country from any family, and more often than not Jared still had to work all day. A moment of silence for all those people working jobs that don't stop for major (or minor) holidays.

Then our TEN YEAR wedding anniversary is on Thursday! Wow. I'd say it flew by, but no, that did feel like at least ten years haha. Cheers to no medical school or HG in our next decade (though of course there will be other challenges). We're going to keep things low-key on our actual anniversary because we will be driving through the night to Utah that evening (not the first time we've spent our anniversary doing a long drive). But we are hoping to have a Lagoon date while we're in Utah, and then we're going to take an anniversary trip sometime down the line (either Hawaii or a cruise that departs from Seattle, maybe Alaska again).

This week I have some pictures of Alice and her "finished" bedroom. I'd love to add a pretty flush mount light, a butterfly mobile hanging from the ceiling, and window trim at some point. Those are low on the home projects priority list for the time being though so we're calling it finished and enjoying it!

Here is your official room tour:

^^Two art prints: an "Alice in Wonderland" still and an Alpine Larkspur for our little Alice Lark.

The only things we bought new for the room are the wallpaper, the drapes, and the rocking chair. Pretty much everything else is thrifted (the rose mirror was in Jared's sister Annie's room when she was little). And now, here's our little Alice Lark in the dress my mom crocheted when I was a baby. Thought about doing her hair up in a bow, but we love when her hair looks like this so we kept it this time to remember this little wavy mop of hair with the cutest cowlicks: