39 Hours

The boys and I left Friday morning to go pick up Erika. She has been at Kara's for the week (since she was out of school for spud harvest break). I missed her! It was fun to see on Kara's blog the pictures of Erika's week. It was all familiar to what she does here (read, make muffins, take care of Hyrum) only she was doing them at Kara's and with baby Max. I'm glad to have her home.

My first stop was at Rilda's for a massage. I was worried about the boys because Derek was going to be watching Justin, Nathan and Hyrum in the Yukon for about 1.5 hours while I had my massage and it was cold! We had everything set up for them to watch a movie on the laptop and I planned it so that Hyrum should sleep most of the time, and if he woke up he was ready to eat and Derek could give him the bottle. I worried for no reason. They had a blast. Nathan even said to me, while pushing me away, "No, go back in". ** And the massage was wonderful. Just what my sore, stressed out body needed.

We got to Utah around 4 and I realized that I didn't have Silvia's phone number any more and she had just moved so I didn't have an address for her. I went to her old apartment and talked to the landlord and we headed over to see the Murillo family. What a great family! On our way home from Utah we stopped there again since Erika was not with us the first time and we were able to spend some more chatter time with them.

Time at Kara's is always chill. We are probably a little overwhelming for the Hill family but we sure appreciate them taking us in for the night. The kids enjoyed watching movies, reading, teasing James and sleeping in.

Our chosen fun for this trip was to go to the new aquarium in Sandy. It wasn't quite what the website had led us to think but it was still fun. The kids enjoyed touching the sting ray, finding all the characters from Finding Nemo and wandering around in the fishy atmostphere. Nathan should have been down for a nap so was a bit of a pill but overall we had a good time.

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I think they were just as impressed with Kara's "huge" library as they were with the aquarium. We stopped at the library in Draper to check out a book on tape for the trip home. It was a life saver considering I have gone over 2 weeks with less than 5 hours sleep each night. We listened to Magyk from the Septimus Heap series. The kids wanted me to drive slower, wanting to get in all 12 hours of audio in the 5 hour trip home.

The weather did help us get through more of the book than we thought we would, though it really just made the trip seem stressful for me as the driver. We saw a truck roll over at the bottom of Malad pass, saw a couple of other slide-off's and had a rude awakening to the fact that winter really is on its way. I'm just not ready for that.

Once everyone was in bed and I was making the nightly lock-all-the-doors-and-start-the-dishwasher rounds I heard a strange sound that I hadn't heard at our house before. As I opened the laundry room window to get a closer listen I saw that we had 2 large owls sitting in our driveway 'talking' to each other. It was so cool! They are pretty loud and their eyes are buggy big!