Lake Powell

The Lake Powell trip stressed me out a bit more than it should have this year.  I don't know, I think part of it comes from being a terrible swimmer myself.  A lot of my concern came from how attached Jasmine is to her three hour nap, and the lack of places to fit a port a crib on a houseboat.  She tends to be a moody little critter when she doesn't get her food and naps on her schedule, and I worried about subjecting three other families to that.

I won't say those concerns were unfounded, but it did go a lot better than I thought it would.  I figured that we would be running home by Tuesday at the latest, but we lasted the entire week.  (By the end of the week, I was DONE, mind you.)  Each day was 80% good, with 20% of Jasmine screaming "MAMA!!" at me when she wanted something, Tyler making huge messes out of food, or Jasmine chucking the food off her high chair onto the carpet, etc.  

The 80%, however, really was a lot of fun!  Christopher is converting me to water and boating activities bit by bit.

I am certainly glad I get the luxury of the houseboat experience.  Christopher and his family have lots of stories of the camping years when they were younger, with sand in all of their food, tents rolling away in the wind, and other catastrophes.  The houseboat isn't anything new or amazing, but it works out just great.

And we had a great spot again this year in Annie's Cove, complete with rocks and sand for the kids to climb all over.

Kaitlyn spent hours out there finding as many shells as she could.

I told her it was okay to wander on the rocks by herself, though she needed an adult to go swimming.  Leave it to her to find a loophole to that rule and take her brother and cousin on a long hike.

And we all had fun playing games and sharing meals inside.  I just love watching babies copy everything they see!

 The kids love swimming off the back deck as much as they can.

In fact, one day Jasmine went boating with us and was intent on getting in the water.  I would dangle her feet off the swim deck when we were stopped, and she would just sign "please" and try to dive in as best she could.  Usually she still wanted a float in the water, though, so that she didn't have her vest pushing her chin up.

I'm just glad Kaitlyn was brave this year!  She wouldn't go in without her floatie, but last year she refused to let go of the ladder no matter what float she had, so it was a big improvement.

 For the adults, the main events are on the "toys".  The waverunners are always a lot of fun, and one of my personal favorite because they don't take any skill.

And the men all love wakeboarding, skiing, and wake surfing.  Every morning we would get a 5am rap on our door so that Christopher could head out with them and enjoy the smooth, morning surface to the water.

And if Jasmine woke up early too, we could both head out with them and enjoy the show.

In fact, they even got me up on the wakeboard!

I'm not very coordinated, so I was rather proud of myself.  And I have to say that I much preferred the wake board to the skiis from last year, since I had a harder time keeping those on my feet and in the right position.

But the real show this year was the tube.  They got a new tube with four seats, and I have hundreds of pictures of everyone (including Grandma!) bouncing around on there.

And the person who was the most in love with the tube rides was Tyler.

He would get on there with a death grip and just laugh and laugh and laugh.  You'll notice in this next picture, however, that Daddy got a little worried.  He can see the tube about to submerge.  Thank heavens for life vests, so Tyler just popped up a few seconds after the tube went down and yelled "that was not nice!" to the boat.

And since Daddy laughed at him, Tyler figured it was all right.

Kaitlyn, on the other hand, wasn't so sure about this.

They were hardly going anywhere, but she asked to slow down anyway.

And when they didn't slow down enough to her liking, she broke down.

So Daddy took over the wheel of the boat and left the engine on idle.  Kaitlyn declared that the perfect ride, though the rest of us were bored out of our minds.

So we let the big guys have the crazy rides.

This is Christopher's favorite picture from the entire trip.  Shoving his brother off the tube caused him to fall off as well afterward, but he said it was well worth it.

And Tyler started to clamber into that tube every chance he got.  Listening to him laugh with every bump made it a lot of fun for me too!

Even if he did like his rides as wild as the big guys. He looks a bit concerned here, but I promise he was laughing as hard as he could once he was back down!

That kid had a grip of steel!

And yes, even Grandma came out.  They had a lot of fun with her.

Crazy guys.

And Jasmine loved coming for rides on the boat!

Other than that, the week was just spend relaxing and enjoying the beautiful scenery.

In the end, I'm glad that my husband pushes me out of my comfort zone a bit!  Being the mom on a trip like this, in close quarters with so many other families, isn't always easy, but it is a lot of fun and wonderful memories for our kids.

Skipping around

I seem to do better with a schedule to follow in my life.  I think this is just the way it is for me.  When I know what to do and when, I get it done in order.  And when I end up trying to make decisions and find my own path, things end up wandering off on me.

As my first example: in all of the summer stuff, I totally forgot to pull the pictures of Kaitlyn's graduation off my camera.  I swear, it happened, and it was cute!  And it happened before almost anything in the last post.  Sigh.

Grandma was still here for the event, even!  (And from the looks of this picture, it's a good thing we had her so someone was paying attention to their songs.)

My favorite part of the show was when they marched out in their caps, because Miss Melva taught them to do a slow "step, together, step, together" and they were hilariously focused on that task.

Such fun friends.

Oh, and when I found those pictures, I found this one too.

A local store has Pottery Barn castoffs, where they send things that got embroidered with names that I just take off.  Usually it means that I get quality stuff rather cheap.  But this adorable, soft rocking bunny was still $45.  On clearance with a name on the side!  Jasmine adored it and didn't want to get off, but . . . there is no way I could justify that much for a toy she will outgrow soon!  Let alone the $145 a new one would cost.  We do visit it every time we shop there now, though.

Anyway, Kaitlyn also had her end of the year gymnastics show.

She was rather disappointed that I ran out of time to put on makeup (since that is what she got to do for the ballet show last year), but getting a medal made up for it big time.

And I would show you more pictures, but I only took video.  On the camera that had so little battery that I had to find a plug and keep it charging in between her "events".  Here's the balance beam video, so you can get an idea.  She's not amazing at it, but that tiny little girl has worked hard and improved this year, and that's all we ask.  I'll be honest, I couldn't do the tumbling or bar stuff she does!

The biggest and most frustrating evidence of my indecision has been our poor cabin.  This week was scheduled to be painting week.  I was going to spend the entire week there painting, and I was hoping to get a good portion of it done all by myself.  But when we picked out colors and got to work, I . . . didn't like either color.  So we have slowly turned the front of the house into a patchwork of colors.

See, years ago, Christopher saw this house in Midway.

He loved the color scheme so much that we had to stop, go back, and take a picture of it.  So, in an effort to recreate that brown, red and white trim look, he picked out a red.  And I picked out a brown.

But the first brown was too yellow, the second one was too pink/grey, and finally we liked the third one.  (That's left to right in the picture.)  Since I made such a fuss about the brown (Christopher was getting really sick of all the changes), I didn't want to put up a fuss on the red, so I spent an entire day painting the eaves over the deck.

And then I stepped back at 4pm, when the afternoon sun was on it, and had a heart attack.

I don't know if this picture fully gets it across, but the word that came to mind in person was fuscia.  Purpley, pink, fuscia.  Ohhhhhh, no.

We've had a few . . . discussions about it since then, and I told him we will test out one more red tonight, and if that doesn't work, we are going right back to the green that I have always liked.  I mean, I wouldn't paint our house with green trim, but I think it suits the cabin just great.  We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, we are also trying to sort out what to do with the trim.  They were obviously going for a Midway "Swiss chalet" look, which neither of us care for.  But if we took off that trim, we would have a big mess underneath, so Christopher assures me it is staying.  I thought that by painting it the background color, you wouldn't notice it, but I don't think it helped.

Ugh.  We'll probably have to paint it the trim color all over again.  And at this point, the entire painting week has been wasted as he made trip after trip to get a new paint color each day.

I hate decisions.