Good News for Utah In-n-Out Lovers

I forgot to mention one of our favorite surprises on the trip. It's true. In-n-Out is opening in St. George. My waist just grew three inches thinking about how much closer we are to a double double animal style, the best fries ever, and a chocolate shake. Hungry?

What the Boys Did While We Were Gone

My sister, Amy, did a great job photo-documenting Saturday with Grandma, Grandpa, the boys and my nieces. Check out the highights at her blog.

They went to the Bean Museum 30th birthday party and to 31 Flavors, then to her house to decorate cookies. Party party party. Luke insisted we not come home until "church day."

She gave me over 300 pictures and I will eventually be posting some of them- here or at my Picasa web album. Thanks Amy, and Mom and Dad for all the fun!

Luke's Top 5

The weekly tradition continues. He fired these off to me today.

1. Word Girl (PBS - he's watching it right now)
2. My alien communicator that you brought me from St. George
3. Harry
4. Bean Museum
5. Playing Mario Galaxy

St. George Temple and SPRING!

We went to the visitor's center at the St. George Temple to clean up and change after the ride. So I wandered the grounds and took some pictures. It was such a beautiful day and the flowers made me so happy Spring is on its way. As I sit here, there is frozen rain on the driveway and a foot-high snowdrift by the front door. Spring will come here, right?

Bearclaw Poppy

Here are some photos from Day 2's ride. The view when we got to the trailhead was unreal.

Here's the route we took. Super-fun trail.
Here's the trail marker. You can see the trail just drops into the canyon from here. Insane.
My sweetie working on getting the bikes hooked up.
I just liked this view of our car just parked in the middle of paradise.
Here we are post-ride. We made it out alive.

Clipless

Jon bought me clipless pedals and shoes last weekend since we decided to be more serious about riding. He has had them for years and loves the connection to the bike. I, on the other hand, I have never even had cages on my pedals so my feet are used to feeling pretty free and I am pretty good at bailing off my bike if I need to. Because climbing is my biggest weakness (down is way more fun) Jon thought the clipless would really help me learn to love it like he does. The guy at the bike shop who fitted my shoes and clips told me I will fall and to not plan on just getting it right away. With that said, Jon and I went home and took my bike into the kitchen to practice. He held my bike up while I figured out how to clip in on the ball of my foot and twist my ankle away from the bike to unclip. I actually fell over in the kitchen. On to St. George.

Day 1 in the Santa Clara Preserve wasn't too steep or scary so it gave me a good opportunity to practice with the new gear. I did instantly realize how much easier climbing is. Stopping is another story. Actually I can stop, but you know how you put one foot down to balance yourself when you stop your bike? Well imagine being attached to it and not being able to get your foot out. I fell while I was stopped - and I kinda lost count how many times. The only time I really got hurt was on Day 2 in Green Valley. It was on a big sandstone rock getting to the trail. Yep. I fell before we even started. I got my elbow pretty good and I have some pretty nasty bruises on my legs. It's actually pretty hard to know which bruises were from which falls!

Here's what the pedal looks like:

Here's the rock I biffed it on. See the three tire tracks on the far left of the picture? The most right are Jon's. He got off his bike to get around the rock to go right. I should have taken note of that and should have dismounted myself, but remember what I said about getting off? Yeah. Not so good. Anyway, the far left tracks are from this guy Shelby, who ended up kinda being a guide for us. His wife actually picked us up at the bottom of the canyon and took us up to our car. They were awesome. Anyway, he barrelled over the rock so I thought I was following his route. My tracks are the ones in the middle and when it was time to turn right, I didn't have enough momentum and I couldn't get my right foot out. Enough said. Boom.Here's my owie. It was so embarrassing that I did it before we even started and at my first thought was to just tell Jon to head down the trail and I would just get some sun and enjoy the 80 degree weather. He wouldn't let me quit and the trail was actually a blast.

Day 1- Hotel, Ride, Food

We dropped the boys off at my folks around 10:30 Friday morning, and headed down South. No worries with leaving the kids there, they wouldn't even stop playing with Grandma and Grandpa long enough to say goodbye! The drive down went much faster than I had expected with Jon and me in separate cars. We had fun.

After we dropped the car off, we went to our hotel to check in and to change for our "warm up" ride. There's a new La Quinta that just opened in Bloomington and it was another nice surprise. When I read that it opened in January and the rate was just right, I booked it, hoping for the best. It was really nice. The room was huge and had plenty of room for our bikes.
We then went out to Santa Clara on our search for the Barrel Roll Trail. We found an awesome website for mountain biking and this trail was one that seemed perfect for my out-of-shape self and our first ride of the year. It also seemed like a good opportunity for me to get used to my new clipless pedals. (More on that later.)

Unfortunately, we never actually found the trail we were looking for, but we were starting to lose daylight and figured we better get going. We rode around some four-wheeler trails that were pretty hammered and I realized I am not completely healthy yet, and I am definitely out of shape! It was beautiful though, and somewhere near 70 degrees. All three of these pictures were taken from the same spot-where we started the ride. We love St. George.
After our ride, we were STARVING and Mexican sounded so good to me. We asked some locals for a recommendation and again, we were pleasantly surprised. Eat here if you're ever on St. George Blvd. looking for some authentic Mexican. Yum.After dinner, we went back to the hotel, soaked in the hot tub for a while and went out for Neilsen's Frozen Custard for our little late night sweet. Ok it wasn't that late, and we were totally in bed by 11 and out by 11:10, but it felt late. I'd like to say that without our little non-sleepers, we slept awesome, but the damage has been done, the habit is not broken in one night. I get up at 2, 4 and 7 no matter what. Day 2 came pretty fast, but Day 1 was great.

Goodbye Honda Pilot

Well, it's gone. And yes, Luke did cry. He was so attached to this car (going through some kind of phase!). We did take it to Disneyland twice, St. George lots of times, Zion's National Park, camping at Palisade, on countless Sunday drives, and as a littler guy, Luke napped many a day in this baby for mom's sanity.

We had 39 great months in our Honda Pilot. It is the longest we have ever kept a car of the 17 in our almost-seven years of marriage. It was a pretty painless process dropping it off in St. George and the guy actually dropped a payment the leasing company failed to bill us about a year ago - which meant with the disposition fee dropped and a payment, we saved 700 bucks! It was one of the most pleasant surprises of our trip. If you ever need to lease a car, call MVM Leasing in St. George! I did feel a little twinge of sadness saying goodbye to my car. I guess Luke has to get it from one of us.

Getting Ready for the Trip

Thursday night we were packing for the trip, so we threw the boys in the tub. It was such a party!

Then Luke fell asleep on the lovesac. Harry fell asleep in our bed.

This is how they were an hour later.

We thought having them sleep in our room would be kinda fun for everyone. We were a little mistaken.

Biking in St. George

Here's a teaser of our biking weekend. We're having fun and will have a full update and lots of pictures Sunday or Monday.

American Idol and Luke

Tonight we were watching last night's results show of AI, and as Ruben Studdard's "Celebrate Me Home" played and as we watched Chikezie's goodbye montage, Jon and I were chatting and suddenly realized Luke was bawling - and not just little tears, those BIG crocodile tears of real sadness. "What's wrong buddy?" we asked. He just broke down that he was so sad Chikezie was going home and it really hurt his feelings because he likes him the most. We tried to explain that he really isn't the most talented of the remaining Idols and all but one have to go home at some point. He wouldn't calm down until Jon suggested we try and find a way to write him a letter or email and tell him how great he is in the eyes of Luke. We'll have to figure out how to pull that one off. Who knew Luke was so attached? We sure didn't.

Luke's Top 5

I can't believe I forgot to do this Monday. OOPS. Here they are:

1. Batman
2. Mom
3. Harry
4. Grandpa
5. Playing Mr. Potato Heads

Our sweet little guy.

Harry's Quote of the Day

Whenever we drive anywhere, we see mountains. Harry loves them and yesterday he said, "Mom, I want to fly in the mountains, I want to fly in the clouds." "You do?" I asked. "La," he said in the sweetest little voice.

"A Trip to Wal-Mart" or "How Far is it to Insanity?"

While I have been under the weather, I just haven't been able to do my regular mom routine. I must admit - our food storage is significantly depleted and getting milk at diapers at Costco has been about as much as I've accomplished the last few weeks. Don't even get me started on the house. However, I've been feeling much better this week and decided today was the day to attack a full schedule, including my dreaded trip to Wal-mart.

After a rather uneventful laundry/kitchen/tidying-up morning, the boys and I drove to Salt Lake to meet Jon at the bike shop. We needed to get our bikes tuned for the trip to St. George this weekend and traded cars and stuff. The boys were pretty well-behaved there. No major events. Life seemed to be getting back to normal. Then the drive home happened.

As I mentioned, we swapped cars, so that meant the boys and I were piling ourselves into the smallish sedan. It's a great car and we love it, but honestly I had forgotten how much room the three of us take and how much more room we have in our mid-sized SUV. Unfortunately, we are not small people, and even Luke's little knees were so close to the back of my seat. And, as much as I don't want to share a major shortcoming of mine, the entertainment system in the MDX really is a major source of my sanity, especially on rides longer than 15 minutes. (I have a philosophy about the timing of seatbelts and carseats being absolutely mandatory and the subsequent invention of the DVD player in cars, but that is another post altogether.) Anyway, the drive home was one of the longest in history. The boys were so excited to be in the "shark car" as they have so affectionately named it, they couldn't settle down. I learned a lesson about how well sound travels in a smaller space. For forty-five minutes that felt more like four or five hours, (we got stuck on 90th in traffic) it was non-stop laughing, screaming, joking, knock-knocking, happy sounds, stressed out sounds when big brother took something from little brother, etc... you get the idea.

As I started to merge toward our exit, I realized I'd forgotten about the Wal-Mart trip on today's agenda and we were completely out of milk. So I stayed on the freeway for two more exits and we made our way to the dreaded, yet beloved place.

I, like many moms I associate with, have a love-hate relationship with Wal-Mart. I love it because the prices are consistently lower than everywhere else, unless you're buying bulk and Costco is my best friend in that case. But I hate it because it's simply never a pleasant shopping experience, with or without kids. Jon and I joke that it's a bad place for our marriage, especially on Saturdays. If I send him out for something at night, he finds any reason to not go there. Albertson's is a whole .2 miles closer to our house and gas is pricey. I've also come to find that anything can happen at Wal-mart and when someone says, "You'll never believe what I saw at the store today," they're going to follow it up with a Wal-mart story.

It started off ok, other than the safety strap on the cart being broken. No biggie. Then Luke got lost. It was probably really two minutes, but felt a lot longer. I did find him in the video game section, after weaving the cart through the packed isles, almost running over unsupervised rugrats on bikes and scooters, not being able to walk more than a foot away from a restless Harry unbuckled in the broken cart. Luke was so non-chalant with his response to his panicked mother, "Mom I was just playing this super cool game. Let me tell you about it." We had a little talk about stranger danger and staying close to Mom at the store and stuff. Somehow that fueled my usually laid-back little guy. He was running the isles - one of my top ten reasons for hating Wal-mart, he was grabbing everything he wanted and throwing it in the cart - not ok. And was overly helpful at the checkout, dropping things and getting in everyone's way - more of my top ten. His intentions to help were good, I think. We did eventually make it out to the car.

By this point I was feeling a little frazzled - more than the normal trip to the store and I was ready to get home. So we started home and Luke was determined to be good for the rest of the outing since I threatened to not play Super Mario with him tonight. With peace finally in the car, I thought it would be a good time to talk to him about the plans for the weekend. We are dropping off the Pilot because our lease is over and the boys are staying with my folks Friday night. Luke started asking questions about the car, and actually got a little tearful. We have had many fun memories and trips in that great vehicle. We then had to have another little talk about how cars are things and the memories we have stay with us but things like cars come and go. I'm sure there will soon be a goodbye Honda Pilot post in the next few days. You'd think after 17 cars in seven years of marriage, we'd have this down to a science. We weren't expecting our kids to grow emotionally attached to the cars.

We made it home and the boys have returned to their normal angelic state (hee hee). I am getting there, how many moms really feel sane anyway? Especially after a trip to Wal-mart.

My Attempt at being Artistic

I've been messing with photos a lot lately, so here's my most recent attempt at something that might resemble art. Someday, I just might have a photoblog, but that seems lightyears away right now. Enjoy some of the sights of Easter....

More Easter Pictures....

Here are the highlights...the rest are at my Picasa Web Album. http://picasaweb.google.com/KSFuller/Easter2008

Thanks to my big sis for stepping in with her camera and sharing her photos.

Easter Sunday

Somehow my new camera's lens decided not to work on Easter Sunday. So my envisioned photoshoot in cute new clothes never really happened. We had a fun day, nevertheless. Church was nice, although we did learn our lesson about filling the kids with sugar just prior to our meetings. More than one of the families who sat by us made comments about how entertaining we are to sit near. Yeah, entertaining for those not involved. We went to my parents' for an easter egg hunt and realized neither of the boys have Jon's or my competitive spirit. Luke got 10 eggs, Harry 12, and Jade and Ivy shared the other 50 - and everyone was totally fine with that - including Jon and me. ;)

I'll be posting more Easter pics, courtesy of my sister's camera. But here's what I got with the old Canon SD300.

Happy Easter!

I love my "dankdet"

We accidentally left Harry's blanket at my folks on Thursday and he got it back today. I'm not really sure how we made it so long without it. And rather than being super excited like how he gets about Little Einsteins, it was a somber moment. He loved and hugged his blanket and finally laid down and snuggled with it. He really does love his "dankdet."