Seasonal Trip to Utah

We just got back from Salt Lake last night. We stayed for 2 weeks and did all of our favorite things from visiting all the grandmas and grandpas many times, to playing with aunts, seeing a few old friends, going riding, to the zoo, shopping, and hanging out, getting our hair done by Aunt Jess, and our dentistry done with Uncle Randy. Grace and Hattie went to Little Gym with Sean and on an outing with Grandma Barbara and Grandpa Earl to Cabellas to see the animals there. We took the kids to Gardner Village in their Halloween costumes to try to get a cute picture with all the decorations there, but Hattie and Sean just run away from the camera, so we didn't do very well with that. I also went to dinner with all my college friends which is so nice to still be able to do.
This trip, Aunt Lis treated us to a week-end trip to Park City so that we could all be together for a few days and be able to do all the late night and early morning stuff together with the kids. It's hard when the babies go to bed at 8pm, so this way, we were together no matter the nap/sleep schedule. We stayed in this big townhouse right between main street and the Park City ski resort. As we looked through the guest book of the house, we felt pretty cool to see that Tom Hanks had stayed there during the Sundance Film Festival this year. We went on the alpine slides the first night there. I haven't been since I was a teenager. It was Grace's first time on a ski lift I think too. We took Sean which turned out to be a little dangerous because you couldn't strap him in and he tried to squirm out of Melissa's arms. We were so scared he was going to squirm right out of the lift chair, but luckily, he made it to the top WITH both shoes! We had a blast cruising down the mountain. Hattie was pretty mad she couldn't go, but after watching Sean, I am so glad I didn't try to take her. Grace and I spent a long time in the hot tub on the deck Friday night and watched the moon rise over Park City's main street. It was very nice.We did lots of shopping at the Park City outlets too. The weather was nice on Friday to do the slides and to go hot-tubbing at night, but on Saturday, it snowed a lot (I guess it snowed in the Salt Lake valley too.) Seeing snow for the first time of the season was actually kind of fun - even more fun that it melted and warmed up the next day.
Harriet is the opposite of Grace. She warms up to the Grandmas pretty fast, but is scared of the Grandpas. Luckily for my dad and Earl, she liked them a lot before we left. It made me glad that we stayed 2 weeks so that she could get to know everyone really well again. Grace LOVES her grandpas, but tolerates her grandmas. She does love them, but she likes to pretend that they are a bother to her. You know she loves them though, when she talks about them when they aren't around. One thing is for sure, Grandpas give the best horsey rides.
Also, for the first time, Sean decided that he likes us too. Up until now, he has only tolerated us at best. This time around, he had fun playing with the girls and even let me pick him up and smiled and laughed with me. That made me really happy. We don't take offense since he treats everyone but Melissa and Randy and my parents with the same scrutiny.

We were excited that we could be there (almost) for Aunt Christine's birthday. We threw a party for her on Thursday night and had fun giving her presents and getting her a cake. Happy Birthday tomorrow Christine!

The one other thing that took a lot of my time in Salt Lake was shopping for fabric to recover my dining room chairs. We inherited David's parents first dining room set. It is really nice and I like it a lot. It will be in the family for as long as it lasts, so we wanted to do a really nice job of getting the chairs recovered. Our neighbor who built and upholstered our kitchen nook is going to cover them for us, so I just had to find fabric. (easier said than done when shopping with kids which is why I did it in Salt Lake WITHOUT them!) After lots of looking and hemming and hawing, I found some that I think will be really nice and will hopefully last a long time. I am so excited to get this done!
We really stayed too busy to get very homesick, but Harriet did miss things. She kept trying to find daddy everywhere we went - hoping that he would catch up with us somewhere. She would see someone who looked like him and yell "da da! da da!" and then was crushed when they didn't give her the time of day. She also missed her doggies. She tried really hard to make friends with my mom's cats (and my sisters' too) and also with Jessica's new puppy. She was only returned with cat paw swats to the face and jumpy puppy paws to knock her down. She is use to throwing her body on top of Shadow and Velvet and petting them for minutes at a time without them even flinching. She was SO excited to get home to them last night and has spent lots of time giving her attention to them. Both girls were happy to have all of their toys back last night and were excited to go into their rooms that they had almost forgotten about.I will say that the airplane trip home was excruciatingly exhausting. We had a 1.5 hour delay to take off (after we were already in the plane on the runway) and then a 3.5 hour (shortened to 2.5 hour) layover in Minneapolis. By the time we got on the second plane, I didn't think I was going to make it except that we were at least on the vehicle that would physically take us to Boston and then maybe someone could carry us out of the plane to the car! Luckily, Hattie fell asleep on take-off and Grace shortly after, so I got to add an hour or so of sleep to the 45 minutes of sleep I got the night before.

Needless to say - I have done a lot of complaining today about being tired. I will try to stop complaining. I guess it's a small price to pay to travel that far with my kids to keep them close with family.