We are finishing up an absolutely lovely two weeks visiting Utah. We've always desired to move back here eventually, but in the meantime we've enjoyed living in and getting to know other states and countries. We've always looked forward to our pop-in trips to see family, visit our favorite Utah hikes and viewpoints, and eat at our favorite Utah restaurants. That said, we are starting to feel done making enormous twice-yearly pilgrimages here. These pilgrimages have been ongoing for over a decade now. They started out as 20-hour travel days from the Caribbean, with multiple flights and looong layovers. For long-time readers, can you even believe that was a whole decade ago?? We didn't have children yet, so it was doable.
Then we lived in Georgia and drove 3 days across the country no less than seven times in the span of two years, and made an additional several flights across the country on top of that. Lots of travel in the last half of medical school for rotations, interviews, etc.
In Wyoming our quarterly trips to Utah were relatively "short," as the drive was "only" seven hours. However, we had a colicky baby in tow so they felt much longer and more treacherous, especially in the winter when road conditions were life-threatening and we'd frequently have to stop for the night in Rock Springs when the freeways were closed due to snow and ice buildup.
Now we're in Washington and have 14-hour drives with two kids who BOTH hate traveling and spend a good chunk of the drive screaming. We could fly with them, but that wouldn't stop Alice (and possibly Jack) from screaming the whole way, and we're not willing to do that. Even if the kids were perfect traveling angels, there's a weary type of feeling around our trip this time. We are ready to just live here in a home of our own full time. Visit family often, whenever we feel like it, but not frantically cramming family time into every day to make the most of a brief one- or two-week stint here, sandwiched by really draining travel days. I'm joyfully exhausted from all the fun we've been cramming into these two weeks, but also really sad that I haven't been able to stop in to see my grandma more often while we've been here. It's impossible to do it all while we're here, but that doesn't stop me from trying to anyway and then I'm, again, exhausted. And still somehow feeling like I'm not doing enough. And the cold I've worked up from not getting enough sleep (yay kids) isn't helping.
I want to see what it's like to spend some of Jared's time off doing something besides traveling to see family. With babies that hasn't been a need or priority so much, but as our kids get older we want to start branching out a bit. We wouldn't want to do that at the expense of getting to spend time with family though, so ya, we're just ready to be living here, for a cornucopia of reasons (that's definitely not a real phrase but I like it). Hopefully these desires will line up with positive outcomes from the interviews Jared has gone on while we've been here: two in Salt Lake valley, and one in Vernal (that's actually where we're headed today). We figure if we keep taking shots at jobs in Utah, we'll eventually hit something. As always, I'll keep you posted! Also as always, here are some pictures from our time here in Utah so far:
Jared and I are celebrating our anniversary today with an overnight trip to Leavenworth, WA. It is our 11-year anniversary, but since we didn't do much for our 10-year anniversary because Alice was just a little baby, we are using up some of our leftover 10-year anniversary energy with our first stay in a FaNcY spa hotel. I'll report back next week how it went! It has been the best decade and beyond with Jared. I love us.
Alice got her cast off this last week! Her arm is looking just how they wanted it to. We're going to continue being extra cautious with her for the next month, but otherwise she is enjoying her ability to splash around in water again and run wild and free.
We had a wonderful 4th of July with Jared's parents. We spent the afternoon at our little town lake and smoked a pork butt for dinner. The fireworks were absolutely out of control. It's fun to have a 360 show of aerial fireworks all around us in our neighborhood. It can be a lot with 8 explosions happening simultaneously for several hours. We knew it was tie to call it a night when Jack ran inside crying with his hands over his ears because it was just too much (and it was also way past his bedtime). Grandma Lambert made some homemade ice cream and a delicious raspberry cake.
We just finished up a much-needed slower summer week than usual, so I thought I'd do a post of things I've tried lately that I would recommend!
(1) Kids' YMCA Camp. Last summer was rough on lil' Jack. Too much time at home with us. Not enough active time or social interaction. So I signed him up for a week-long summer day camp at our local YMCA this year. Each week of the summer they do a different theme. Some weeks are focused on crafts, other weeks on animals or water play. I signed Jack up for the week called "Game On," which I figured would be lots of active play, sports, and, well, games. Jack's perfect trifecta. I was initially bummed that it happened to be at the very beginning of summer, but ended up feeling so grateful that the week overlapped with Alice's time in her cast. We can't do much during cast time, so it was good for him to be out having fun, and for me to take a deep breath and regroup after a tough first week of summer.
It was a hit for everyone. He came home so tired and happy every day. The hours were 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but because many of the kids at YMCA are there primarily as a means of childcare during the summer while parents work full-time jobs outside the home, we could drop him off as early as 7 a.m. and pick him up as late as 6 p.m. At a very reasonable price for full-day summer camp. The first day I dropped him off at 9:00 and picked him up at 4:15. But it seemed like most kids were there earlier and leaving later, and he had so much fun that each day he requested I pick him up later and later, until at the last day we let him stay all the way until 6:00. Apparently the big Jack Fun was all happening after hours in the form of dodgeball and "sharks and minnows." Hooray. YMCA camp will be a new summer tradition as long as we live near a Y. (He was really tired/amped up all weekend so I'm looking forward to giving us both a more relaxed pace at home again next week.)
(2) At-home laser hair removal device. Technically I think it's called an at-home IPL device. This is the one I got for my birthday in May. I've been using it for a month now, and so far it's a big success. No more bumpy, ingrown hairs or constant itchy phase all summer. It does require regular upkeep, but less upkeep than shaving and it's so convenient to be able to use at home. I know it works best on people with pale skin and dark hair (hi). But yes--would absolutely recommend. As long as I get a good shave before using it it's pretty painless.
(3) "Do not disturb" sign for neighbor kids. Lol. I ordered this sign for our front door after last week's neighbor kids debacles. It swaps between "Welcome, Please Knock" and "Do Not Disturb." This week whenever a neighbor kid would knock on our door, I answered and said, "Hi! Jack is at YMCA camp this week. We got this sign so you can see when he's home and available to play. If it's red then that means he's gone or can't play. If it's green, go ahead and knock!" Hopefully this will make next week go better than the first week of summer. It will probably be swapped to the green side in the late afternoons and that's all.
(4) Peach Fresca with a splash of cream. Heard about it on a podcast. Incredible. Would recommend.
And now, some pictures from our week:
Happy first week of summer break to you! It has been a ride. Not at all what I expected it to be. I anticipated that we might experience some of the difficulties we did last summer (Jack wanting too much of me and getting ragey). But that has not been the case at all. Jack has been lovely and we've had some really sweet times together. Alice is old enough to play with him more, and I've made some changes around our house/schedule that have really set us up for success this summer.
The difficulty so far has been with the neighborhood friends. On the first day of summer they were knocking at our door and ringing our doorbell constantly. We got back from the park and 2 minutes later there were kids at our door. I told Jack he could play with them for 20 minutes before we needed to eat lunch and have nap time/quiet time. He did so and then came back in. But the neighbor kids were back knocking within minutes. "Can Jack play at 2:00? We are going to blow up water balloons then and have a water fight!" That was going to cut both of our quiet times short, but it was the first day of summer and I'm not a monster so I said yes. Jack finished lunch and I got the kids upstairs. It wasn't long before I started hearing screaming on our porch. I peeked out our window and saw 3 neighbor kids playing on our porch, pushing each other on the baby swing and screaming/laughing. I figured they'd go away soon since Jack was gone. They did not. The yelling got louder and soon I started hearing thuds against our house as they thwacked the swing against the wall. NOPE. I went out and told them that Alice was trying to sleep and they'd need to go home until Jack was done, and then I'd send him over to their house. They left, but 5 minutes later I was hearing the same sounds, and lo and behold the same kids were back with two more kids from the neighborhood.
I spent the rest of the quiet time and day policing the neighbor kids and teaching Jack about play etiquette, as one time one of his "second-tier" friends came over and asked to play. He said yes, but 4 minutes later a "first-tier" friend came over and so he ditched the initial friend to go play with the other friend, and the first friend looked so sad and dejected and asked if she could play with me and Alice and it was just a long day. At one point a kid barged into our house, without knocking, when Jack wasn't even there. One of Jack's friends is a 30-year-old woman with disabilities who is about 7 years old mentally. She's really sweet and I don't mind them playing together outside in our front yard, but she can get attached to me and Alice and Savvy too and it just adds another level of complexity. I feel like I can't enjoy our front porch this summer because if any of us are spotted, the peace will be gone for the next several hours. I took Alice's swing off the front porch and it's being stored in the guest room because I don't want it drawing in neighbor kids during quiet time anymore, especially when they aren't respectful of our property or of my requests to come back later.
The other part of the "neighbor kid" problem is that Jack's favorite friends in the neighborhood are a really rough little bunch. Not great influences. It's a 5-year-old boy and his 9-year-old uncle who carries his phone with him everywhere and will show Jack videos on youtube (big red flag). They are mean, get physically violent when upset, name call and swear every time they open their mouths. But they are the friends that live closest and the friends that like to do the same things as Jack (active games and sports). They are always outside or knocking on our door, so they're constantly on his mind. I've been tweaking our schedule every evening this last week to try and put up boundaries to protect my boy and to protect my own peace and happiness this summer. Our new schedule includes a relaxed breakfast, doing some chores, leaving the house, then coming home for lunch, quiet time, and computer time. No friends until after computer time, and even then . . . I'm going to do my best to keep Jack out of the neighborhood as much as possible. Our day just goes so well until the neighbor friends come into the picture.
I want to be able to just send my kid out in the neighborhood to play with friends all summer. I'm really pretty laid-back and loved my own childhood summers playing tag with friends all day. But the kids on our particular street are rough, they disturb my peace, and there's a level 2 child sex offender who lives 4 doors down from us. Combine all that with getting rejected from our last viable prospect for a Utah job last week . . . I've just been feeling stuck and discouraged. I ordered an open/closed sign to put outside our front door to try and train the neighbor kids that they can only knock during the very limited times each day when the sign will be flipped to "open." And I'm jumping back into the research phase of job hunting to see if we can get any other options on the table. Jared talked to his intermountain contact last week and they said there won't be any new family physician openings in or around Utah Valley until 2026. So we're expanding the radius to, likely, the entire state of Utah. I am dying to be closer to family/Jack's cousins, and to be able to move to a safer neighborhood. Pray for us! And now, some pictures from our week:
It's getting late, but I wanted to publish a post before the end of the day--especially because tomorrow is Jack's last day of school and so writing time will be more difficult to come by for the next few months. We finally heard back about our "big career news" this week aaaaand . . . it was a bust. No job offer extended. Jared specialized in rural family medicine during residency, and the tricky thing with rural medicine is that oftentimes rural clinics are looking for a family physician who will also do OB work. Jared did get a fair amount of OB training during his residency and he delivered lots of babies, but he didn't specialize in OB, and he didn't like the higher-risk environment of delivering babies. The rural job he interviewed for in Utah ended up hiring a family physician with an OB fellowship instead of him. We wish they would have told us from the get-go that they were hoping for a family physician who would also deliver babies. In the end he wouldn't have been as happy in that type of job though, so the outcome is probably for the best. But it still stings to be turned down.
There are no other job prospects on the table at this time, so for now we settle in for a gorgeous PNW summer, relax our pace a bit, and continue to keep our eyes peeled for Utah jobs. The pickings are a bit slim since our loan repayment plan requires Jared to work for a nonprofit hospital system at this time. Luckily Jared does love his job here and we do love the beauty in this area of Washington. Our town's not all that family friendly though and we wish our kids could grow up closer to their cousins and in a better school district than where we currently live. It's also just been a long time since I've lived close to my family, and even though home is wherever we are, I'm frankly feeling a bit homesick for where I grew up. It's officially been over a decade of living far away now. And I wish I could spend more time having lunches with my mother and grandmothers in Utah. Grateful to be close to Jared's parents here though and share lots of special moments with them. They are planning to retire to Utah in the coming years too though. So. Pros and cons to being here a while longer. Like with all places. A few pictures from our week:
The post that already went up this morning is one I wrote and prescheduled last week. But it doesn't really match the mood of the day so I wanted to write this more current post about our weekend we're just coming out of. Saturday evening, Alice took a fall off our patio table onto the concrete below. She had climbed out of her clip-on seat onto the table after dinner, and just as I was reaching over from the other side of the table to lift her off, she slipped backward and landed flat on her back on the ground (or so I thought at the time).
I immediately knew it had been a serious fall. Alice just lay there screaming, not attempting to roll or get up. I ran to get Jared before scooping her up, because I didn't want to risk moving her the wrong way if there was a back injury, and I really value his doctor eyes in these types of situations. Jared picked her up gently and tried to comfort her. Her back was scraped up and so was the back of her head. She looked dazed to me, so my mind went straight to "concussion." Jared got a bath ready for her. I didn't feel comfortable putting her in by herself and she felt pretty limp, not really holding any weight, so I got in with her. She sobbed the whole time and was shaking. I asked Jared to take her to an urgent care, but he insisted that he knew the signs of concussion and wanted to watch her a little longer. It was past her bedtime, but I didn't feel comfortable putting her to sleep in her crib by herself, and she's not a baby who will fall asleep in your arms. I decided to try and get her to sleep in our bed so we could keep an eye on her throughout the night. I turned on a toddler show to try and calm her down, which helped. Within half an hour she seemed more like herself and could answer our questions and point to things on request. It was also clear she wouldn't actually fall asleep unless she was in her crib. Jared assured me he would check in on her a few times during the night and take her to the urgent care in the morning if there were any concerns.
She woke up once or twice in the night and Jared went to check in on her. In the morning when I went to get her out of her crib, she kept pointing to her arm and saying, "Ow, ow." Jared told me she had done the same during the night and he noticed she wasn't using her arm much. He made her a makeshift arm splint and off they went to an urgent care while Jack and I got ready for church. After several hours at the urgent care, it was confirmed that her head and back were fine, but she had broken her elbow. The elbow must have taken the brunt of the fall. It was bad enough that she would need to have surgery to get pins put in. When he called to tell me, I had just dropped Jack off at a friend's house so I could run to a meeting for my calling. The stake center is half an hour from our house and I cried the whole way there. The ladies in my calling were so nice and it turned out to be a blessing to have some alone time in the car to cry while Jack was gone, and have a distraction for an hour or two and some older moms in my calling to comfort me and tell stories of their own children getting hurt and everything turning out ok. I called my mom after and then Jared video called me and I got to see Alice in her little hospital gown before her surgery, in mostly pretty good spirits. I felt a lot better after that and Jack and I had a nice afternoon together, talking and clearing the floor of tripping hazards in preparation for Alice to come home and making brownies.
Alice's surgery went well and she came out of the anesthesia great. She got a cast and was happy and a little loopy from the anesthesia when they got home. It is going to be a challenge to keep her safe and stable and dry for the next 3 weeks until the pins come out--she is not allowed to fall at ALL during that time or the pins might get knocked loose. But I am grateful that the surgery went seamlessly, that Jared is medically knowledgeable and took the lead on the all-day venture of getting our baby fixed up, and that it was an arm injury instead of a head injury. I'm quite nervous about keeping everyone safe and happy when Jack's summer begins next week, but trying to focus on gratitude that he will be in school for another week and a half. We are doing ok. Alice is a trooper. We are going to be more cautious going forward. And now you're all caught up! Should be an interesting few weeks.
^^The two pictures Jared took in the hospital. I feel like he had to have taken this one for irony purposes? I'll have to ask him. He was really impressed with everyone at Seattle Children's Hospital. Our experiences with medical professionals in the Seattle area have been really great so far.
So like I mentioned in last week's post, we found a VRBO cottage on Lake Bosworth, which is pretty close to where we live. Vacation rentals fill up FAST in this part of Washington since we're so close to Seattle (lots of people looking to go on a summer vacation). Knowing that this might be our last summer in Washington we really wanted to do something as a family. Top of my list and what seemed easiest with a toddler was to stay at a house on a lake and spend the days snacking and napping in the house, lounging on the dock, and playing on the water. The tricky part was not knowing if we'd be moving this summer. If we do find ourselves moving, that would likely be happening in August. So we blocked August off as a no-vacations month, just in case. In July we will likely be visiting Utah for a family reunion--especially if we aren't going to be moving to Utah the next month for a new job. So we blocked July off too, just in case. That left June. Not the hottest of months in Washington, but if this was our only guaranteed option for a "summer" vacation we'd gladly take it. And at the time of booking our vacation (two months ago) Alice still wasn't tolerating long car rides, so we decided on this lake close to home. We booked the only two nights still available.
Unfortunately, it did end up raining the entire time we were there so there wasn't much dock-lounging or water play, but we had a great time nonetheless. Two days and nights of games, yummy snacks, braving the rain, and making some wonderful family memories. It was worth every cloudy, rainy minute. Jack went to bed in his window seat overlooking the lake with the biggest grin plastered across his face each evening after we played several board games. And neither of our kids woke up during either of our nights there! Like, at all! That rarely even happens at home, and never on vacation for us. It might've been our very first trip since before Jack was born that nobody woke up in the night. It was an unexpected vacationing-with-young-kids miracle. (We did have AMPLE difficulty getting Alice settled to initially fall asleep for her bedtimes and naps though, so we didn't get let off the hook too easy.) Here are some pictures from our lovely, cloudy time at Lake Bosworth:
I'm writing this post on Sunday to be published tomorrow (Monday). We will not be home. We will be on our first family vacation as a family of four! We have done several trips to visit family, but this is our first attempt at a "vacation." We wanted to do a family vacation somewhere in Washington this summer. But all the cool places we haven't been to are a bit of a drive, and with our vacation track record it would probably just be hours of kids crying in the car, and then a full night of no sleep because Alice would have trouble sleeping in a new location, and then we'd call it quits the next morning and abandon ship and head home. So I found a little VRBO cottage on a cute lake 10 minutes from our house. We're calling it our vacation with training wheels, because if Alice won't sleep at night one of us can run home with her for the night sleep, and if we need a break from Jack during the day we can send him to school haha. And actually, we will be sending him to school! That was originally the emergency escape plan, but then Jack informed me he would be SUPER bummed to miss pizza Monday, and his teacher let me know it's end of year testing, so it's a vacation, it's a staycation, it's a couples retreat (if Alice naps while Jack's at school) . . . this could be great. The only bummer is that we were hoping to spend the two days we're there living on the private dock and kayaking around the lake, but although it was sunny all last week and will be hot and sunny again once our vacation ends, the forecast shows a constant downpour from the time we arrive to the time we leave. We're doing the only thing we can do and packing puzzles, games, sweatpants, and lots of snacks and leaning into it. It's going to be our lazy rainy sweatpantsy lake vacation.
In other news . . . there really isn't any other news from our last week. Le sigh. I mentioned we were expecting big news this week, but it never came. I am abandoning all expectations and fully prepared for it to take several more weeks before we receive any big news. Rest assured I will let you know if and when we do! In the meantime, this is the perfect time to unplug and get away on a sweatpants vacation. Some pictures from last week:
