Utah Trip

We had a lot of fun on our trip to Utah over Spring Break. We stayed one night at a hotel, partly just for the novelty of it, and partly because my two sisters were staying with my parents and they both had babies to tend to all night. Not that I got any more sleep at the hotel... I learned Sam sleep walks and Augie steamrolls anyone in bed with him.

Anyway, the Hampton Inn is a great hotel and I highly recommend it. They have a free "suite shop" with complimentary snacks, a great pool and hot tub, a full breakfast buffet, and all the bathroom amenities you want or might have forgotten. Here are pictures of us playing in the pool. It was Grandpa's birthday and he came to watch the kids play around.

Later we had a birthday party for Dad. Ammon treated us to pizza hut for dinner. Valerie made a very good German chocolate cake. We found a small votive candle to put on top.

Dad and Rachael

Eating our pizza

Eating the cake! yum!

Augie with Johnny, who he always calls "my funny cousin."

Abby and Taylor had a great time playing dress up. Valerie had a real masquerade mask from Venice, Italy and Abby was the mystery princess.

These girls kept Ammon busy "dancing" all night long. When he wasn't twirling them around, they would pile pillows on top of him and jump on him. He gets Uncle of the Year award for all the dancing he did! It was almost nonstop.


Sam as a mariachi guitarist

We spent most of the day Saturday working on the farm. We stripped the roof off a shed (the boys helped with that), carried a billion pieces of baling twine to the dumpster, rounded up metal for recycling, and emptied out a couple rooms in the barn that were just full of junk. We found some pretty cool antiques, too.

You can see under the truck the stump of the tree, which was formerly growing through this truck (it has not run in 30 years).

burning the branches


This shed will now be a greenhouse to grow vegetable starts for our family's new venture: farmer's market vegetables.

On Monday we said goodbye and drove back to Idaho. We had Taylor stay with us through the rest of the weekend, so we drove her to Riverside, UT just before the Idaho border where Rachael met us and we had lunch before we finished the drive back home. This is a picture of all the grandkids with Grandma.


Here is the video for our "Uncle of the Year"