Cedar city - the tradition continues

Its been many years since Chris and I were able to go to the Utah Shakespearean Festival with his family. We were all very excited to be able to make it this year. We only had 2 and a half days of plays but we were still able to see and do a lot. Chris and Edward and Grandpa were able to go golfing two of the mornings. It had also been many years since Chris was able to participate in the illustrious ILLCRIC tournament put on by the AGA. He did pretty well! (INSERT CHRIS' OR SPORTS WRITER FARFEL MILLER III's DETAILED RECAP HERE). 

While he was golfing the kids and I had breakfast in the hotel lobby and swam in the pool with cousins. 

As for the plays, We were blessed to have babysitters (thanks Edward, Kayla, Dixie and Jess!) for Chris and I to get to see some plays together. We saw a Monday matinee of 12'th Night, then Chris went to the evening performance of Henry IV Part 1 while I wrestled the kids to sleep in the hotel room. The next day I saw the matinee performance of Sense and Sensibility. It was fun to see a book I love so much as a play, but it just made me want to read the book and watch my favorite movie version again. Tuesday Night we took Alec with us for the evening performance of Comedy of Errors. 

Jess was taking Mady to the same show and it was fun to see the next generation initiated into the Archibald tradition of Shakespeare plays.  The siblings were cute as they simultaneously explained the play's plot to their oldest children who listened well and sat still with serious expressions. So precious to watch traditions being passed down.  The play itself was set as a western and had lots of body humor, I loved hearing Alec and Chris laugh out-loud. There was one particular part that I really enjoyed when one of the silly 'Masters' was slapping his 'servant' for something and the servant spun his head in the wrong direction of the slap. It looked unscripted as both actors paused for a second in shock and started laughing! It was hilarious. Live performances are just awesome. 

We took the kids to the Green show one night and Chris was sooo excited when he learned they were bringing back the puppet show he used to watch as a child, 'Punch and Judy.'  

Again, seeing traditions passed down from my husband to my kids was fairly magical to me. 

The next morning we had to check out of the hotel and then run off to the family Picnic with the festival's founder, Fred Adams. Chris' Aunt is his daughter and since this festival is a larger Woodward family yearly tradition they always have a picnic with Fred.  We hadn't yet gotten in the traditional shopping at Christiansens and the Cedar City Deseret Industries, so we squeezed those in and BARELY made it to the festival for our last and final show. We were taking all the kids (except Frederick) to Into the Woods. Alec and Charlie did great. Gwen....euuhh... she wasn't old enough to appreciate it yet.  We had watched the Broadway video version with Tiffany and kids a few days previous so the songs and story were familiar, but it also prepared us for the second half of the play that was full of adultery and death. So because we were also driving the 20ish hours to Texas as soon as the play was over, we decided to just watch the first half. It was a good decision. 

It had been a long, fun and full trip and we were ready to get our van back from the body shop in Texas and get home.  We drove straight through the night as we were sort of on a time crunch. Chris drove until 2 ish when we stopped at a gas station to try and sleep for a bit, but Frederick woke up with the car off and I tried to feed him over and over again to keep him quiet so Chris and the other kids could sleep. But by 3:30, I was getting annoyed and told Chris I would just drive for a bit so Frederick could fall asleep. Surprisingly I was feeling ok, and drove until about 8:30 AM when Chris was a bit refreshed and ready to drive while I fell asleep. But its hard to sleep while all the kids are awake, cranky from many late nights in the past 3 weeks and tired of being in the car. They demanded attention and being very cranky myself, I didn't handle their squabbling very well. Two moments stand out in my memory...

At one point, after harping on them over and over again in a not kind voice, I reached a breaking point and turned around to deliver some very strong words.  Seeing their 3 pouty, sad faces made me stop and it was like my eyes were opened and I saw them through new eyes. I saw 3 adorable, tired, troopers who had been strapped to seats for the past 15 hours. Instead of more complaints I smiled and gave them compliments and how great they've been for most of our trip and remarkable they were in their car-trip stamina.  It was like I could see their agitation melt away and they unfolded in the bask of my praise. That moment was a real blessing from God. 

The peace didn't last forever and I started to crack again during breakfast. Usually the kids do really really well, eating in the car, but in the span of 30 minutes, Gwen had spilled her Chocolate milk all over her car seat and the car's seat and Charlie accidentally dumped his yogurt down his seat. Having just battled a nasty smell in the car before our trip, I was SO FRUSTRATED about the dairy spills and so tired from not much sleep that I started ranting as I leaned over the seats and used wet wipe after wet wipe to try and get everything clean. I realized I was behaving poorly and I knew it was mostly just tired so in between rants about how gross and hard this was to clean up I apologized to Chris and the kids saying I was just tired and I'm sorry.  The boys had been playing a shooting game at each other across my head as I leaned over to clean it up and at one point I slumped back and  half growled under my breath, "just shoot me!" The boys heard me and went still with serious eyes, watching me in my distress, and then looked at each other as smiles spread across their faces. Simultaneously, they turned their finger guns at me and at the same exact moment started making shooting noises as they "shot" me many times. It was too funny to pass up and I started laughing, which made them laugh, which made Gwen and Chris laugh. I'm sure it wasn't so much true laughter as it was relieved chuckles that I wasn't still so angry. Its interesting how laughter really can defuse stressful situations. Another blessing from Heavenly Father. As was this huge, beautiful double rainbow we saw somewhere between New Mexico and Texas. 

Herriman Time

Not many hours after the Harker's left, we met with some Betteridge family to go bowling at BYU. The kids love doing this and are getting pretty good! My mom and Hailey were still in UT from our Heber Reunion and so we spent some time with them too. We packed up all our stuff from the Archibald's (where us and the Harkers had stayed) and we camped out at Jared and Ashley's up in Herriman for a couple of days to get in some more time with my family. We were all kinda exhausted from everything that we took it pretty chill there and just basically played around the house. 

The little girls loved having a baby (someone younger than them?!) to play with and were happy to give Freddy toys...after toy, after toy. To me, Clara and Amelia still seem like little babies themselves! They enjoyed playing with the toys as much as they seemed to enjoy placing them by Frederick. 

For the most part, Frederick enjoyed the attention.

We did make it over to a neat store where they have an indoor Ferris wheel, which was fun to ride. I kept thinking we would play outside more and go to parks or the reservoir or something, because i thought UT would seem so much cooler after being in hot and humid MS and TX, but it still felt pretty hot. Inside stuff seemed the most appealing. 

At the moment, I can't think of anything else we really did...I guess we painted nails, watched movies, played with bubbles... Chris had to work most of those days, I think. Oh! Anthony and Amberly stopped by one day and we got to see them and their cute kids. We played a fun couch game where every person picks a famous person to 'be' and writes the name down on a paper. Then one person reads all the papers, only once and then everyone takes a turn making one guess at someone's name. Then if the guess is correct, the revealed person sits by their reveal-er and they become a team.  Also Anthony flew one of his remote controlled airplanes for us. Fun times. 

Harkchibalders Reunion

The evening after our Betteridge reunion ended, we met up with our good friends from Canada, the Harkers! They happened to be in UT for a family reunion the same time as us and were able to stay around an extra few days to have a little Harkchibalders reunion with us. It was their first time meeting Frederick the Cutie Pie and our first time meeting little Layla, less than 2 months old. Obviously there is a match set in stone between the two and we decided to take some betrothal pictures:  (we honestly didn't stage any of the touching... I guess they agree with the arrangement!)

At least Freddy seems really happy about it.

We had fun taking them to see things around Provo. I thought it would be easier to wing it, but it turns out Provo has changed a lot and I don't super know lots of good kid-places. Whenever we're there we usually just hang out at Dixie's. We took them to the newly remolded Bean Museum and ate at the Cougar Eat on BYU campus.  We tried to get some ice cream from BYU's creamery but with all the EFY kids there, it was CRAZY packed and busy.. we decided to just go to a splash pad and get some ice cream from another place.  

Christy made us all these shirts. She's pretty cool like that. 

Christy and I were able to go on a run the morning they left (and my running buddy, Amy from MS who also happened to be in UT the same time came too!) but all too soon it was time to say goodbye. We've really missed this family and many of our other Edmonton friends, it was so good to see them. 

First car accident

On our last day in Texas, we were driving back to Thom and Brittany's house from the bike rental store, when a tiny little dog started to dart out in front of the car in front of us. The lady immediately slammed on her breaks, and we did the same. Simultaneously the dog had second thoughts and turned right around to jump back into the bushes.  So we let off the brakes but unfortunately the lady driving the little smart car in front of us didn't see the dog's retreat and continued to break even harder to a complete stop on a busy 5 lane road.  By the time we realized she was stopping even more, it was too late and we rammed into the back of her car. That crunch of metal and plastic was unmistakable and I was surprised we hit her so hard/loud... I didn't think we were going that fast. All of our kids started crying and we immediately pulled over to the right. Everyone had seat belts on and no one was hurt, Charlie had a little red mark where his seat belt (not properly in the little slot on his booster seat) had rubbed his neck. While I was checking and calming the kids Chris walked over to the lady to see if she was ok. She immediately apologized saying she knew it was all her fault, but she just couldn't hit that little dog. She seemed pretty shook up and I tried to calm her down. Our car looked worse than her little smart car (go figure!) and we exchanged information. Apparently this was her first car accident which was kinda funny since it was our first one too. I'm glad Chris and I could both experience our first accident together, it would've been so much more stressful for me without him there.

Blessedly this all happened literally in front of a Geico and Honda partnered collision-repair body shop and Rental car center! Our van was leaking something from the hood so it was deemed undrivable.  The kids and I waited in the lobby while Chris worked out the details with the rental car people and the body shop people and Thom (who had driven over to help) unloaded and reloaded all of our things from our van to his van.  Luckily they were minutes away from a rental car hub so they could get us minivan within 20 minutes.  They said it would probably take about 10 days to fix our van, which would work out just fine since we were going to be in Utah for almost 2 weeks then instead of driving directly to MS from UT, we would just swing by TX again to pick up our van. Although the whole experience seemed really annoying to me in the moment (like really annoying), in hindsight I can see many blessings and am just grateful things went so smoothly... it could've been a lot worse! The $500 collision deductible wasn't too bad but combined with the $1000 for a rental car...ouch!

We had a new Chrysler Town and Country for the rest of our trip. The satellite radio was fun and the fold down captain seats were pretty cool, but we both missed our Odyssey.  

On the road again... Texas for the 4th!

We left for another big road trip, TX for the 4th of July and then on to UT for a Betteridge reunion and the Shakespeare festival.  We got on the road fairly late since it took a while to clean out the car (there was a really nasty smell that I could never find the source of!) and Chris had to go to work. We left around 6:00 pm and had an 8-9 hour drive ahead of us. We had some flies in the car at one point and we unrolled the windows to get rid of them. The kids weren't expecting so much wind to blast their faces: 

We arrived at Thom and Brittany's around 3AM or so and then got up early to make it to the McKinney Texas 4th of July parade. A small town American parade was a great start to celebrating the birth of our country. We saw fire trucks, boy scouts, veterans, old fancy cars, horses etc. 

Then we hit up a splash pad and park for a hotdog roast dinner with really yummy cupcakes. 

Chris wanted to get some practice in for the magic show he was thinking of doing at the Betteridge reunion and the kids were more than happy to oblige him.  His made up Land of Mysterioso and the magic words, "abra ca-da-myrioso" made the kids smile and laugh. 

Anxious to explore their new surroundings, we decided to go on a hike at a nearby nature preserve with mountain bike trails. We found a tire swing and of course HAD to try it out, over and over and over again. It was so much fun. The dads decided to rent mountain bikes on Monday and come back to actually ride these trails. 

The only down side to the hike which we didn't really figure out for a day or two was that we didn't adaquately guard against chiggers. Charlie, Alec, Graham and I got SERIOUSLY munched on. I counted 40+ bites between my knees and my navel. Eugh. Those huge, raised, red bumps were terribly itchy, painful and so ugly.  Poor boys had them all over their groin...wherever their underwear was tight against their skin. 

But we didn't realize what had happened so we obliviously enjoyed the rest of the day at a delicious, Texan BBQ house -- where they're so chill they don't even use plates, just a square of wax paper-- and then off to Brittany's parents house for a swim. 

This was the first time we went swimming this summer and Freddy's first experience with his swimming suit. Gwen tried out her swimming-by-herself-with-a-lifejacket skills and did AMAZING. I love watching my kids be so independent in a swimming pool (with life jackets still, but it is nice to not have to be the human island for all three of them all the time...their toes can really pinch and scratch!) 

Monday we went to the Dallas Science Center. It was so big. They had this cool interactive displey where you stood in this special spot and flapped your arms or leaned this way or that and the projected screen in front showed your flying movements as an eagle or hawk or something. Also there was this cool device where you program into the computer a picture and then a wheel of lights spins so fast that it makes your picture blur together - hard to explain. 

Chris had just as much fun as the kids figuring out how all the robotics stuff went. It was a really fun science center. 

Whew! a fun fun weekend. It ended kinda crazy with our first car crash, but more on that later.  It was really fun to see Chris' brother's beautiful brand new house and let the cousins play while the adults talked. I love our family.