Ice Castles 2019

When my world-traveling-30k-followers-on-Instagram sister received notice that she would be given press passes to the Ice Castles in Midway, she decided not to leave Malaysia to come back to Utah to use the passes.  Strange.  But she did offer them to us, and we happily accepted.  So we set out on a Tuesday night (unheard of 'round these parts!) for a little adventure.  Ben was out of town, Cat had a lot of work to do, and Jack didn't get his piano and homework finished in time to join us, so Eliza and Luke and I went out with our friends Ani and Traci.

We were bundled up in our snow gear but it was still very cold - cold enough that my cell phone kept turning off!  We walked around and explored, admiring the beautiful colorful fountains and walls.  The kids went down a few ice slides, sat on ice seats, walked through ice tunnels, and we watched some fire-twirling performers.  We also took advantage of the press pass benefits of free refreshments (choice of warm cinnamon roll, cookie, or hot chocolate) and a free souvenir photo.  It was really fun, and really cool.  See what I did there?  Yeah.

  

Suz, if you get any more open-ended passes to do free stuff in Utah while you're on a different continent, feel free to send them our way.

January Earned Family Fun

Personal preface: Someone asked me recently what my strengths as a mother are.  I was stumped.  I couldn't think of a single thing I feel that I do extremely well.  Instead, I think I'd grade myself at a C or B in most categories, worse in some.  When I talked to a different friend about this conversation afterward, she asked if I do a lot of things with my kids outside of the house.  I quickly replied that I do, because I personally enjoy having fun experiences and seeing new places, and I find that I do a better job of focusing on the kids and just enjoying time together when we're out somewhere and I'm not trying to clean and do laundry and catch up on this-or-that.  My friend said that she's much more comfortable at home, and doesn't get out with her kids very much.  So.  Maybe going out with my kids is a strength?  Or perhaps it's simply a way to get all of us away from our busy everyday?  Either way, I do enjoy getting out with everyone.  And we've been more deliberate about making it happen recently.

We've been working at establishing a Saturday pattern that includes both cleaning or working at the house AND a fun family outing.  At the beginning of January as our family outing we saw an impressive production of "The Wizard of Oz" at a fancy new local theater and had a great time.

The following Saturday we wanted to go sledding.  Unfortunately, no matter what we tried we could NOT get Jack to pull his weight during cleaning time that morning so he wasn't able to join in the fun.  Which meant I had to stay home with him and try to keep him from having fun at the house.  But Ben and the other kids, and our friends Tony and Katja, had a blast on their little trip.  Since there wasn't enough snow for sledding in the valley that day, they drove up to the parking lot above Aspen Grove on Timpanogos and found a good hill with TONS of snow and just a couple of other families sledding.  Eliza ended up with snow in her boots right away and we realized later that she actually got frostnip (the beginnings of frostbite!) but the soreness and reddish rash went away after a few days and she was fine.  Here are the videos Ben made:

Then the weekend after we were in San Diego we took the kids to the BYU Museum of Art (free art museum on campus) for an exhibit I was really excited to show them.  I'd seen Patrick Dougherty's work in the fall when I was on the campus of USU performing with the choir and I knew the kids would really like it.  This one took a lot of convincing for Jack to help with the cleaning because he was sure he wouldn't like the art museum, but I kept reminding him that he can trust me when it comes to things that are fun - we couldn't think of anything I'd predicted the kids would enjoy that they hadn't enjoyed.  Thank goodness he ended up doing his work - barely in time - and we were able to enjoy this cool sculpture as a family.  Patrick Dougherty has work on exhibit at prominent and not-so-prominent locations around the world so we'll have to be on the lookout to see if we can find more of his work as we travel.

There is a story about the exhibit HERE and I included the MOA's timelapse video below just for fun.

San Diego - Days 4 & 5

I apologize for the accidental publishing of this unfinished post last week.  This is the finished post.

On Sunday morning we went to church then ate lunch in our rooms.  In the afternoon we ventured out to Balboa Park, which is a huge area with tons of attractions for all ages.  This is where the San Diego Zoo is located, plus gardens, an outdoor organ and performance area, lots of museums of all different types, event spaces, and more.  Our first stop was the Model Train Museum, which I think might actually exist as an excuse for grown men to pursue their model train hobbies (and perhaps recruit a few people too).  This was literally just an area to walk through and see model trains of various scales race through costum-built cities, farms, mountains, etc.  It was fun to see what the workers had put together.  We really liked this room that had lots of characters and even a video camera mounted on one of the engines so if you stood in the right place and looked at the monitor you could see the train's view of you as it drove by.

We stayed in Balboa Park the rest of the afternoon.  We walked around and took some pictures, rode on a (bigger) model train, and went on the carousel.  (We thought the carousel was particularly cool because it's so old - it was built in 1910 in New York, shipped to Los Angeles, spent a few years in Coronado, and has been at Balboa Park since 1922.)  Then we rounded out the experience by watching a street performer, who invited Jack to join his show.  Oh, and Jack got in a few minutes of Pokemon Go too.  That night we had dinner at Burger Lounge and dessert at Andy's new favorite funky ice cream place, Salt & Straw.

Our last day in San Diego was a Monday (MLK Day) and we were excited to finally make it to the beach!  We spent the morning on Coronado, checking out the Hotel Del Coronado (and appreciating the "Some Like it Hot" memorabilia, even finding the movie playing at the kids' favorite part, the final scene) and playing on the beach.  It was cold and windy and there were warnings posted about the ocean water being contaminated, but that didn't stop the kids from having a great time, in and out of the water.  (And nobody has grown any extra limbs, so the contamination must not have been too bad.)  We had lunch at a local place called Clayton's that we really liked, then headed back to the hotel to get our suitcases and put on warmer clothes before going to the airport.

Jack found a friend with a big shovel and they had fun "building aqueducts."

Our plane was delayed so we had extra time to play cards and hang out in the airport before arriving back to freezing temperatures and 4+ inches of snow on our frozen-shut van in Utah.  Suddenly the "cold weather" in San Diego wasn't so bad!

San Diego - Day 3

Saturday in San Diego we went to see the USS Midway, a huge aircraft carrier that was in service from 1945 until 1992.  It opened as a museum in 2004.  I was hesitant at first to take the kids on this little excursion, thinking it wouldn't hold their interest, but I was happily wrong - we ended up staying for about 3 hours.  The kids enjoyed seeing the ship, pushing buttons and turning knobs, and checking out all of the planes and helicopters on the flight deck.  The younger four (including Sawyer) all had a turn in the flight simulator, too, and that was the highlight for them.  I believe the highlight for Ben was seeing an engine room.  He talked to the docent for quite a while and really enjoyed checking out all of the machinery.

Tiny, steep little stairways on the island tour.

Sitting in the seats of the Boss and the Mini Boss (the people who oversaw the operations on the flight deck).

Cat was excited to see a reference book by Nathaniel Bowditch,
someone she studied in school earlier this year.

  

From there we had lunch at a yummy little place just down the Embarcadero, then Andy and Amy took Sawyer back to the hotel for a nap. Our family stayed in the area a little longer to check out the Unconditional Surrender Statue just down the way.  (As it happens, George Mendonsa, the sailor believed to be in the famous V-J Day photograph this statue is based on died just a couple of days ago.  Read about him here.)

Then it was back to the hotel for some down time.  I accompanied Eliza to the pool, Ben did some work, Cat took a nap, and the boys hung out in the kids' area at the hotel.

  

We'd originally planned to go to Coronado that afternoon but since we spent longer than planned at the Midway and surrounding area, then had our down time at the hotel, we opted for Old Town in the evening instead.  The first stop was the Mormon Battalion Museum, which was really interesting and held everyone's attention very well.  The various parts of the journey to San Diego were represented with different interactive rooms that the kids even enjoyed.  We all learned something and came away with a new appreciation for the hardships those men, women, and children endured.  The kids had fun panning for (fool's) gold afterward, and we let the sweet Sister Missionaries take an old timey photo of us.  We tried to look serious so as to make it authentically old timey, but being serious is easier for some of us than others.

Then we walked around looking for a place to have dinner.  Old Town San Diego is known for great Mexican restaurants, and who would have thought that they'd all be crawling with people on a Saturday night?  We stopped and listened to a Mexican musical group for a while, and the kids danced a little, but when we heard about the hours-wait at some of the restaurants we opted for root beer floats from the root beer float and jerky shop (seriously) and had fun choosing from dozens of specialty sodas for our dessert-before-dinner.  Once it was too late for anybody to even want dinner anymore, we went back to the hotel and ordered dinner for the adults to be delivered to the room and the kids ate leftovers that we'd stashed in the fridge.  It was a good day.