Day One (continued)

I forgot to mention in "Day One" that we no sooner walked into our hotel room before the kids were stripping their clothes off asking where their swimsuits were. Needless to say, we spent most of the day swimming. Then we went to Brad's Food Hut for dinner (oh, yummy greasy fried food and thick shakes) and came back and played games. It's so fun now that our kids are older and they can play games that are actually enjoyable for Austin and I as well. Our favorites are Mexican Choo Choo (dominoes), Sorry and Pictionary, Jr. We get pretty competitive during Pictionary! We just went in the breakfast "dining room" and slid some tables together. We laid Jack down in the hotel room with a make-shift monitor (we forgot to bring one, so we had my phone call Austin's and left mine in the room and brought his with us and left it on speaker. It actually worked pretty well! Thank goodness for free mobile to mobile minutes!) Jack finally went to sleep and we played games. When we were done, without thinking, we gave the kids the room key and they ran up ahead. Do you think they were nice and quiet upon entering the room? Of course not! They barge in and Jack starts crying. Yeah! Now I'm completely exhausted and Jack's awake and ornery! Grr... I wasn't a happy camper. He just crawled around on our bed for awhile and then he eventually went to sleep. It's never easy trying to get four kids (one being a baby) all to sleep in the same room. It did happen though...eventually.

Day One

If any of you have ever traveled with children, you know how much work it is to actually get out of the house. After a day of doing nothing, and I mean nothing, but laundry (I think about 10 loads by the time I was done) and then packing everything, I think we're all ready to go first thing in the morning. Well, then you have to get everyone ready for the day, which always takes longer than it should and then you have to get all the paraphernalia, people, stuff, etc. in the car. I have some hereditary disease where I have to clean my house before we leave on a trip. I think it's because my mom always did and I hate coming home from vacations so much as it is, that the thought of coming home to a messy house is almost unbearable. So, I do it to make me happier to come home. Also, I know that this is a bit morbid, but what if something happened to us while we were gone and someone had to go into our house? Needless to say, by the time I am ready to leave, my family's been in the car waiting for me for way too long. I go out into the garage to get something as I am preparing to leave and all of the kids are ready to go. At this point, they are waiting patiently, but by the time my rear is actually in the car and we are pulling out of the driveway, my entire family (led by Austin) is singing at the top of their lungs, "Here we sit like birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness. Here we sit like birds in the wilderness, waiting for Mom to come." Off we go...finally.

So the kids are all excited to finally be on the road. We get no more than 2 miles when I get this nagging feeling that we need to get new tires before we drive out into the middle of nowhere. One of our back tires has had a slow leak for awhile and I just felt like we needed to get it taken care of. I almost didn't dare say anything because the kids (not to mention Austin) would be so annoyed, but I couldn't ignore it. So, our first stop was to get tires. Woo hoo! I was definitely wrong about the kids' attitudes. They thought it was the coolest thing ever that they got to stay in the car while it was being jacked up. Who knew?
Just about every time (it seems, anyway) we head down south, Austin likes to take a stop in Parawon where his dad grew up and his paternal grandparents are buried. So, we take a pit stop in Parawon and we head over to the cemetery. I have to tell you that Austin has a little obsession with cemeteries. Well, not really cemeteries, but as part of his geneological duties he feels like he needs to take pictures of headstones. It's not a bad idea, seeing as how you can get most of the accurate info that you need from one picture. So, we pay a visit to the graves of his grandparents (although it might sound like I am, I am not complaining about this...I think it's very sweet), but Austin then decides that we need to search out any and all other Orton's in the entire cemetery, something it feels like he's done a million times already. However, this time he did remember to take a picture of a headstone that he didn't have. It's one of his main ancestors (Orson Owen Orton, or as we so lovingly nicknamed him, "O to the third" or "O cubed"), so I guess it turned out to be worth it! Austin has passed his love of headstones on to Paige, who insisted on going around and picking up any loose fake flowers and decorating this particular headstone. It's all a little strange to me, but at least it's a productive and free hobby, right?:)

Our Trip

We had a ball in Cedar City over Spring Break! We were only gone for three days, but we sure got a lot in! It's amazing all of the stuff you can do when you don't have other distractions and responsibilities. While we were there, Austin and I came up with a great idea. Well, it was mostly Austin's, but I'll take a little credit. We had so much fun and we realized it didn't really matter much where we were. We thought we should invent the "Stay At Home Vacation". You could hire a housecleaner to come in each day. The first day they do a major cleaning. Then everyday after breakfast and you leave for the day, she could come back in and make all of the beds, clean up all of the dishes, put out fresh towels, etc. just like they would at a hotel. Then you just spend the entire day out and about just like you would on vacation, but in your own hometown. As we were walking in "downtown" Cedar City, I realized that we'd never done this in our town. How sad. We just perused by the stores and popped in a couple. It was fun! So, we thought we could have some of the perks of the hotel (minus the pool and ice machine), you get to know your own hometown better and you get a clean house at the end of it all! What do you think? I'll post some pictures, but I'm just going to blog it bit by bit so I don't bore you too much!

Kidism...

Kamae and Austin were playing Uno the other day. After several rounds of him winning, Kamae says to him, "Dad, can we play something else? You keep winning. Do you have Dos?"

Wish us luck!!

We are finally giving it an attempt. Up until this point, the thought of it was painful, but we may actually finally be there (then again, we may really not be, but I just think we are and this could be disasterous!). Austin and I are going to attempt to take a trip with just our family. Any previous "vacations" we've ever taken with our kids either consisted of going with family or visiting family. We are not going anywhere fancy, but the place we found does meet all of the stipulations and criteria: 1) Needs to have an indoor or heated pool, 2) Needs to not be a dump, dive or hole in the wall, 3) Needs to be within close proximity of a bowling alley and a movie theater, 4) Needs to have high-speed internet seeing that Austin is on call this week 5) Needs to be no further than several hours of driving distance and 6) Needs to be somewhere warmer than here (which, as of lately, isn't too hard to do...Alaska could meet this need right now!). So, the verdict? Cedar City, here we come! Woo hoo! No offense, Ally, but I never thought I'd choose that as a vacation destination. St. George (either due to a marathon or purely Spring Break) was pretty full except for 1 1/2 to 2 star joints (not happenin', folks), so Cedar City it is! I will keep you posted on how it all goes! Like I said, wish us luck, because we're going to need it!

Calling All Creative Minds!!!

Silly, silly kindergartner teachers. The ones at my school asked me (yes, me) to head up/choreograph/teach all 80 kindergartners their dance for the dance festival at the end of the school year. I was really excited at first, but the more I got thinking about it, the more petrified I became. She originally told me that I'd start teaching the beginning of May, but on Monday she asked me if I could start teaching on Friday. I said, "Okay" pretending that I didn't completely procrastinate my assignment. Me? Procrastinate? Never!:) So, come Thursday night at 11:30, I decide I should probably come up with something. So, I was up until 3:00 figuring it all out. Hopefully it'll work. However, I want to use ribbon sticks. It's just like a dowel with a 2 1/2-3 foot ribbon attached to it. I need some ideas on how to make them cheap and indestructible. Any thoughts? Help me out guys!!

Jack's 1st Haircut

Be careful what you say! I mentioned to Austin that Jack needed his hair cut and the next thing I know, I hear the clippers going in our bathroom! So, if you feel like you need a hair cut, keep it on the down low when Austin is around!:) To my surprise, he actually did a really good job!

Sledding

Austin took the kids down to a nearby park that has the perfect sledding hill for these little kids. The older kids who were a little more adventurous even built a jump. As I was getting out of my car to video tape my kids, another boy was walking up to his mom just bawling his eyes out and he had blood all over his face. I guess he got a bloody nose and a split lip from a bad landing off of the jump, so my kids were forbidden! Thank goodness, they thouroughly enjoyed going down the plain little regular hill! Here are some videos!

LegoLand

My kids thoroughly enjoyed our trip to LegoLand. If you've never been there, it's definitely worth a trip... but probably not worth going back to for the price. Lucky for us, though, our good friends had leftover tickets from their trip in November and they gave them to us...thanks, Scott and Linda!! They have a section of the park that is just a bunch of cities completely made from legos. It was very impressive and the details were amazing! Spencer is standing in front of one of the hotels from the "Vegas strip".



This was one of the few rides that Spencer was able to go on that he thought was a "big kid" ride. He went on it probably seven or eight times in a row. There wasn't much to it, but he enjoyed pretending to attack the lego figures in the middle with his make-believe sword. Hey, whatever keeps them happy, right?



The champions of the fire truck rescue race! They toasted everyone else!!


Craig taking a "snooze" and Kristen bothering the poor old sleeping man! The lego "artists" (not quite sure else what to call them...sculpturists?) had a good sense of humor. You can't really see, but this guy's socks were two different lengths and one of his shoes had a much thicker sole than the other. If you pay attention to all of the little details at this place, it's pretty entertaining!

Traffic jam! Spencer loved this one as well. We thought that the guy that worked here had to be underpaid with how frustrating and patience testing his job must be. Anytime one of those little kids ran into the curb or the fence, he'd have to walk over and pick up the front of their car to reposition them. I got annoyed for him by just watching!


I really wish that I had a picture of this from further back. The older kids could drive these cars through a little city with streets and stop lights, stop signs, etc. It was really cute!


They had to raise their hands when they understood all of the road rules. Kamae very enthusiastically did so!



Jack was such a trooper on these day trips! He just sat in his stroller so contently...couldn't have asked for him to be any better!


Not that I am an amusement park connoisseur, but I've never seen a ride quite like this one. It was an arm with chairs attached to it. You get to pick the "thrill" level of the ride and that determines how fast and crazy it goes. The kids could only do the lowest one, but they enjoyed it nonetheless. Of course, the adults had to do the highest one!

Austin and Kamae
Craig and my dad



The whole day it was threatening rain and it got windy at some points, but we lucked out and it didn't rain until about 20 minutes before the park closed. So we ducked into this little place where they could build and race their own lego cars. It was kind of fun to only have 2o minutes to do it because it was a race to see who could build one that actually rolled down the ramp in time!

Swimming and Knott's Berry Farm

The kids absolutely loved being able to swim in the heated pool. I need to remember that our family can take a vacation to the middle of nowhere and as long as there was a pool, they'd be content. This was Jack's first time swimming and he seemed to enjoy it. I could've sworn I took more pictures of the kids swimming, but I guess not. This is all I have!






I decided at Knott's Berry Farm that we were just going to enjoy the day and not worry about taking pictures of everything. We just took a couple. We had a great time here and it was perfect! It had rides for all ages, we were pretty much the only people in the park so we didn't have to wait for anything. There was enough for the little ones to do, but unfortunately Spencer was the only one who was caught in the middle, meaning he wanted to ride the bigger rides, but wasn't quite big enough. The last picture will tell you how well he handled that!