52 Blessings

Week 3: FAMILY

I love it when family comes in town -- that's why family is my blessing for this week. My sister, JoDee, and her four children came down from Utah to visit this last week and I just love it because it is as if the world stops and you can escape for just a while from real life. We just spent day after day hanging out, doing crafts, shopping, dropping the toddlers off at preschool (Aidan and Savy's teacher took Baylee on for two days which was lovely), and just having fun.

Hence, my house, my dinners, my blog, my reading of your blogs, and many other things were ignored for a week. This week reality has set in and I've finally got laundry done, a clean house, bills paid, emails/spam cleaned out and now I'm blogging -- and it's only Tuesday! Yahoo! And I do have a lot of catching up to do. For now, I'll begin with our trip to Tucson last Friday when we visited Colossal Cave and the SCI (Safari Club International) Natural History Museum.

The morning started out like this:

This is the "girl car." Baylee and Savy in the back and London and Madalyn in the middle. I also love when JoDee comes because she's the only sibling of mine that has reproduced girls! Actually, she's the only one that has reproduced two different sexes come to think of it -- everyone else only has boys. So my girls LOVE spending time with girl cousins for a change. On Nate's side all the girl cousins live far away and only the boys live near. JoDee and I had fun going back to the 80's with Madonna and Wham! -- maybe it was preparing us to rock the 80's on karaoke night.

Grandma with all the little lovelies - Davyn, Aidan, Baylee, Savy, London and Madalyn. Andersyn is, of course, the typical teenager who wouldn't get in the picture. We decided to go to this smaller cave instead of the larger, more famous Kartchner Caverns and boy am I glad of that. The tour inside the cave lasted only about 45 minutes and I was beat afterwards! Besides, I don't think we could have kept our kids quiet during any longer of a tour. I was quite impressed with Savannah though when she informed me that night at dinner that we needed to take daddy back to the caves in July to see the bats -- she actually listened during the tour when the guide told us to come back in July-August to see bats. Who knew the four-year-old was listening?

London looking out over our Arizona desert.

Cousins. Madalyn has to be the favorite because she will occasionally get into play-mode and actually play with the toddlers. I don't know how many times we would be downstairs crafting and Madee would run and hide in some corner and then Aidan would quickly follow, calling her name; he was especially enamored of her and wanted her attention constantly. London has renamed her little Webkins dog from Sara to Madalyn since they left.

The SCI Natural History Museum was awesome for many reasons:
1. tons of animals in cool poses
2. it was very small and easy to get through within an hour
3. very toddler friendly with lots of the animals that they could touch

Savannah and her lion.

This lion is one of those that can be touched, so you can tell it's been through some wear and tear. London wanted desperately to get a picture with him, but refused to stand anywhere near his head. I don't know about the folded arms. . . maybe she's protecting herself.

This full-size giraffe grabbed Savy's attention and she pulled me over for this picture, informing me that giraffes are now her favorite animal. Can't you see the love?

Yes, it was fun for them to be able to touch some of the animals. Savy's trying to look scared and Davyn just thinks she's crazy.

This picture took a long time to get set up with that many children after a long day. Everyone was always looking or moving a different way, but I finally got them all half-way decent. So here's to the end of a long, but very fun day. I really think I need to take more time to explore our own state since I've lived here mostly my whole life and there are so many things I haven't seen. Sometimes I think Nate's seen more (and knows more) than me and he's only lived here since he got home from his mission!