Summer 2021

I used to take so many pictures when my kids were toddlers. They were just cute, brushing their teeth, eating lunch, going to the park. They loved to get their pictures taken. When you try to take pictures of teen/tweenagers doing everyday things you get eye rolls at best and stuff thrown at you at worst. 

So, I just don't have as many pictures as I used to. Arden was the only kid in summer 2021 that was excited to get her picture taken. Cora was not a fan, but Daxton would actively run away if he saw me even looking like I was thinking about taking a picture. But anyway, I'll give you what I have. Here we go:

First up! Memorial Day Trip to Bear Lake. Arden brought her friends Emily and Allie. They brought cute dresses and wanted to have a photo shoot! Somehow, I got volunteered to be the photographer, but I am not good at it and have only a cell phone, but here are some of the hundreds (literally) of photos they made me take:

Awww, they are so cute! Sometimes when you are a girl friends can be hard, and there can be a lot of drama. But what would you do without them? 

They weren't ready for this one, but I thought they looked cute in their matching towels.

I guess I felt like I had taken a lot of pictures, but I only got Arden and Co, but everyone else was there too...just not documented on camera. Oh well. 

The next time I broke my camera out was Girls Camp!  Yup, I'm in Young Women again! Cora was 12 so this was her first girls camp, and it was fun to get to go to camp with both Arden and Cora. We camped in tents at a site at Rendezvous Beach at....Bear Lake. But can you ever really have too much Bear Lake? I say no.

Us leaders had our own tent, and so it was me, Char, Adriann, and Bridget, and we had a great time in our fancy tent with cots. We even got shushed by the girls in the nearby tents late at night once or twice, bwahaha. Here we are in our circle.

There was such a pretty sunset one night!

We went and hiked the Limber Pine trail one day (no pictures?) and we played at the Lake another day. We brought paddle boards and kayaks and stuff and it was super fun. Brant, Nikki's husband was a great sport and threw all the girls in the water and they couldn't get enough of it.

There was the huge rubber band thing that someone brought where the kids would run back and forth and throw themselves against it, and I was sure someone was going to get a concussion but no one ever did.

The girls spent a lot of time painting their nails and making bracelets. Somehow they talked the bishop into letting them paint a stripe on his hair? He's such a good sport.

Another night, another beautiful sunset! The last night was a talent show. Arden and her friends did a dance to "Cruisin for a Bruisin" from Teen Beach Movie (yes, they still love the songs), and there were some magic tricks and some singing (Cora and her friends sung a song) and us leaders introduced the youth to the Marcarena. Good times.

And of course there was the nightly fire and smores!

Sometime during the summer I went for my annual mole check and they found another pre-cancerous one they wanted to dig a big hole around.  At least it was on my shoulder and not my face, right? 

Ooh, it's so pretty!  Use your sunscreen, kids!

As far as day-to-day summer, this is the battle I would face each day. Each. And. Every. Day.  Especially with Daxton, who loved to play video games (Minecraft, Fortnite for a while, a little later NBA2K). And he also doesn't like to clean stuff. Or put laundry away. Or read books. You get the idea. I didn't take any pictures of the daily negotiations.

We went to a baseball game or two, of course!  The boys were there too, I promise!

Arden does like to read books! And watch sunsets! She used to take the dog for a walk on the trail in our neighborhood to a view spot and she would read a book and watch the sunset. She took a picture. 

Arden spent a lot of the summer busy being in "like" with a boy from school. They got together with friends a few times and even held hands! (Yikes!) Dont tell her I told you.

We went to watch the fireworks at the golf course. Dax had invested in a fancy light saber and wanted to bring it and play with it in the dark. I tried to take his picture, and he didn't have time to run away so instead he just pulled his hat down over his face. But I swear that is Dax:

We had a couple of pool days with our friends the Hibberts, which are always super fun and relaxing. Dax was here too, I promise.

I didn't really take many pictures until our next trip to the cabin with the Wongs. We made our first trip to the Bridgerland Adventure Park! They have a big ropes course and a zip line and some tubing hills. But Dax was the most excited to try the ax throwing. He did pretty good! Here is him posing with a bullseye he did (sorry he is so small!)

Here is Cora up on the ropes course, she's so brave!

Arden was killing it on the ropes course. She still has some great balance and good upper body strength from her gymnastics days, so she is built for this:

We also went to the Pickleville Playhouse on this trip! The show was called "Becoming a Bona Fide Bad Guy," and it was pretty funny!  None of the boys (Dax or the three Wong boys) or Cora, wanted to be in the picture, but little Grace did, so Arden went with her:

The Young Men had a camp...at Bear Lake. Well, up at Beaver Mountain. Preston was not in Young Mens, but they wanted as many dads to come as they could get, so he tagged along. They did a hike (see picture, taken by Preston), went up to Bloomington Lake and swung on the rope swing, and did a lake day and even went to Minnetonka Cave: 

He does exist! Preston and Dax are on the left in this picture. I do not know why Preston is wearing shorts and a t-shirt inside of the freezing cold cave? He would be perfectly happy if temps were in the 60s all year round (whereas I am most happy in the upper 70s), but I'm sure he was a little chilly but probably fine.

A little later in the summer, we had my work party at the zoo. Arden thought she was too old to come, but Cora and Dax still came. Here he is, I have no idea how I got him to look at the camera and smile?  But yay!

And looook! Me and Cora got to feed a giraffe!  Giraffes are my favorite animals, so this was supre fun for me. And Cora looks happy too!

In August, school started to loom. Cora wanted to go early and figure out her locker. It was haaaard at first, but she got it figured out eventually! She's so happy! How is she is junior high???  Cora spent a lot of summer playing with friends and also soccer kept her pretty busy.

Cora's team won the Strikers Cup tournament over the summer!  Yay girls!

Dax loves music, and was kind of going through a retro phase when he was listening to a lot of classic rock kind of stuff. A Queen cover band came to the Sandy Amphitheater, and I asked him if he would want to go with me and he said yes! He had a good time and we got another picture of the kid!

He came home and listened to Queen pretty nonstop for a couple of months (I still haven't fully recovered).

And just like that (and a few dozen more days of screen time negotiations), and summer was over. 

Spring Break 2021 - Puerto Morelos, Mexico!

Remember spring break 2020? We were supposed to go to Costa Rica but then COVID hit? Well, the airlines let us keep our credit, but we discovered that we had one year to use it, and we had to use it for something international since the first one had been international. This was hard, since most of the world was still not super open for leisure travel. But one place was, so there we went.  MEXICO 2021!

We wore masks at the airports and on the planes, but we were used to it, so we didn't mind much. 

We stayed at a resort in Puerto Morelos, which is a little town between Cancun and Playa Del Carmen. It was the last hotel at the end of the beach there, so we called it "The Last Resort" (I think the real name was like Royal Residences, but that is not as fun).

Our room was really nice, and highlight-we had our own pool!  Notice my poor fair-skinned boy hiding in the shade to avoid getting sunburned on the first day, poor guy. He must be descended from Vikings, his skin was not meant for sunny southern climates. But he liked swimming in the shade and after the sun went down.

That evening me and Preston went on a walking food tour of Puerto Morelos. It was super interesting learning about the history of the town, the history of the migration of people to Riviera Maya, and the different kinds of food available and their origins. We had some delicious seafood empanadas, different kinds of fish, and of course different kinds of tacos and desserts, and our guide Cristobal was super friendly and interesting and knew everyone. It was so fun, and so yummy! (the kids had pizza back at the room, which suited them just fine, they are not always the most adventurous eaters). 

The next day we went down to the beach and enjoyed ourselves in the water. The waves were pretty big, and there were some rocks under the water waiting for you to stub your toes on, so it was a little tricky to get into the water. But the beach was beautiful. We decided to eat lunch at the hotel restaurant, which was delicious, but windy!

While we were waiting for our food to show up, me and the girls deicided to try out the cute wood swing nearby.

The kids all enjoyed trying out the virgin Pina Colada, and all agreed they were excellent. I was boring and stuck with my old reliable Diet Coke. The food was so good, I love fish tacos above nearly any other food.

We just relaxed at the beach and our little pool the rest of that day, maybe took a walk up the beach, but overall it was just the relaxing day we needed.

The next day we got more ambitious and headed into the jungle for an adventure! We headed to an "adventure park" called "Cenote Zapote." We signed up for a package that included ziplining, swimming in three different cenotes, and a bike ride through the jungle. When we first got there, we saw lots of "wildlife" in the jungle, consisting mostly of gigantic spiders which freaked Cora out (I had told her earlier that there we not bugs in the jungle in order to get her into the car...she understandably felt betrayed, but ended up having a great day so she forgave me).

Here was a cool-looking lizard that was hopefully on his way to eat some gigantic spiders:

Our first adventure was ziplining! They encouraged us to leave our phones in a locker so they didn't fall into the jungle, so I don't have any actual pictures of this part. Cora was a little nervous at first, and was hoping they would let her and me do a tandem zipline together. We climbed the first tower, and watched Preston, Arden and Daxton go before us. When it was only me and Cora, I told one of the fun tour guides we were with that Cora was nervous and asked if we could go together. He said "Sure, no problem! Let me get her hooked up first." Cora smiled a little as he hooked her harness to the zipline. I was starting to wonder how I was going to fit on there with her, when the tour guide looked right at me, gave me a big smile and a wink, and PUSHED CORA DOWN THE ZIPLINE.

Cora has been lied to again! The tour guide laughed as Cora zoomed away, but I was not laughing...he doesn't know what he may have done.  I was worried that I was about to be in BIG trouble. I considered making a break into the jungle, but I decided to be brave and zipped down to the next platform where everyone was waiting. Lucky for me, Cora was smiling when I landed. She thought the ziplining was super fun and wasn't mad about being tricked! Phew!

She was fine to zipline solo the rest of the way (which was good because the tandem zipline was a big lie), and everyone had a fun time. Arden even got fancy and ziplined upside down once or twice. 

Next, we headed to our first cenote. Cenotes are bodies of water that started out underground, but sometimes the roofs of the caves they were in have fallen in so some are open to the sky, but generally still have tall walls all around them. This one was open to the sky. It. Was. Stunning!  It was a heavenly clear blue color with beautiful green plants growing all around.

Here is Arden, swimming as I looked down from the rim above. 

Some of us got brave and jumped into the Cenote (which is deep enough that people scuba dive in it) from an elevated platform. Preston and Arden did it, so I had to do it too! (I ended up landing wrong and hurt my tailbone a little, but I still felt brave)!  Dax and Cora opted to watch from below.

After we were finished exploring this cenote, we got to take our first bike ride through the jungle to our next cenote. Everyone did pretty good on the bikes, but again Cora almost ran over a giant spider and got a little freaked out...dang spiders! 

The next Cenote was a bright green color, and had a zip line you could hold onto and then fall into the water (here is a picture of me going down the line right before I let go to fall in):

It was fun to watch other people go down the zip line...if you didn't let go soon enough, the zip line would hit a rubber barrier that was there to stop people from hanging on too long and hitting the rocks on the other side. Generally, you were going a pretty good speed by the time you neared the barrier, so if someone didn't let go in time, they generally swung pretty far and did some impressive unintentional flips in the air before hitting the water. (In the defense of the tour guides, they told us at least 57 times to let go of the rope before we hit the barrier before we even got on the rope. Then they told us again right before they let us go. Then they would yell LET GOOOOO! LET GOOOO! when it was time to let go.  But it was still surprising that about 1 in 10 people somehow didn't let go. No one got hurt and everyone came up laughing, but luckily none of the people in my family forgot to let go.

This cenote wasn't as pretty to swim in, so after we all got our fill of the zip line and watching the other people zip lining, we headed back to the bikes and went to our final cenote. This one was still in a cave, with only a very small hole in the ceiing. It was so cool and had a kind of quiet, mysterious vibe:

We snorkeled around in here for quite a while. The water was crystal clear and there were fish swimming around, and lots of cool stalactites and stalagmites both above and below the water. 

Here we all are on our way back up the stairs, standing below the small hole in the ceiling that led to the jungle above:

After all of this adventuring, we were STARVING! Lucky for us an all-you-can-eat lunch was included. We at tacos and rice dishes and other yummy stuff until we couldn't eat any more. 

It was a super fun day, and everyone had a great time!

The next day we had another relaxing pool/beach day, and didn't take a lot of pictures. We headed into town to eat dinner, as the food in the actual town (away from the hotels) was about half as expensive and very yummy!  We also had discovered the all-important churro cart, which we visited many times during the trip. Here is Cora smiling for a picture as we waited for our delicious food to arrive!

All rested up, we went on another adventure the next day! We had been trying to decide if the kids would like to go and see some Mayan ruins or not, as they were about a 2-3 hour drive from the beach where we were staying. Preston and I had been to Chichen Itza about 15 years previous to this, but we had heard it had kind of been overrun with vendors, so we decided to head to Ek Balam, some ruins that are not as developed or as large as Chichen Itza, but also not as popular. 

The drive was pretty uneventful and kind of boring since you can't really see into the jungle, but we made it eventually!  The ruins were really cool! I had downloaded an online tour guide and it would tell us interesting facts about the buildings around us (it was connected to my GPS) and the kids were super interested, especially to hear about the ball game and the human sacrifices :)

Here is the ball court:

The two most wonderful things about Ek Balam are (1) that it is SO not crowded, and (2) they still allow you to climb all over most things and explore inside of buildings, which was sooooo fun and perfect for curious tween/teens.  Here are Arden and Cora headed down from the top of one of the medium-size ruins on the site:

Next we decided to climb the big one:

It might be hard to tell from the picture, but those are some STEEP stairs. Mayans must have had very small feet because only about half of my foot fit on any of those stairs, which made things pretty exciting.

Dax used the hybrid climb/crawl method since he is a litle afraid of heights. But he view from the top was worth it!

It was so cool to look out across the jugle from the top! They say on a clear day you can see the large pyramid at Chichen Itza nearly 50 miles away. Climbing DOWN the steps was actually much scarier than climbing up, but we all made it down.

There were some AMAZING carvings in this temple, at least as good if not better than anything at Chichen Itza.

AMAZING! and they have only really uncovered the front and top of this temple. We walked around the back and it was still nearly completely covered in jungle plants, it just looked like a steep hill. 

Here is Preston taking a little break...it was HOT and very, verrry HUMID.

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They had some guys there who were descended from the Mayans in the area, and they were dressed up as ancient Mayans. They showed us some artifact replicas, and even let Arden wear a headdress for a picture:

We were all dying of heat after our explorations (see Cora and Arden's red faces above), and lucky for us there was a cenote nearby, which had been used as a water source for this ancient city.  It was so nice to jump in those nice, cool waters!

After we were all cooled off, we headed back to the car for the 2-3 hour drive back to the hotel. However, the kids had had soooo much fun that they begged to go straight to Chichen Itza (50 miles away) to see more cool stuff. Unfortunately, it was already around 3:30, and Chichen Itza closed at 5, so it wouldn't have been worth it. But it was nice to know they enjoyed learning about the ancient Maya!

The next day we decided to take the kids snorkeling! Everyone was so excited, except Arden. She just didn't feel like it.  Teenagers, right? So the rest of us headed down the beach a little and had a great time snorkeling. We saw lots of beautiful fish, and Cora and Dax were troopers for their very first snorkeling adventure:

After the snorkeling (I didn't have a waterproof camera so you'll jut have to trust me on the fish), we had a lovely lunch at a cute beach restaurant near the dive shop. Then we just had a nice walk down the beach to explore a little, before heading back to check on Arden. On our walk we saw this pillar that was seriously leaning...I talked Cora into jumping up there to get a picture:

Such a beautiful place! 

Arden had relaxing (but more boring) day hanging out at our little pool and reading her book. She loves scary/murder books so she was happy as a clam to have an afternoon away from the parents I'm sure.

The next day we were originally going to go to a water park, but the kids begged and begged us to take them to Chichen Itza. I wasn't personally excited to make the drive again (AND back), but we gave in and decided that if that is what they were interested in we would try and support. I downloaded another tour guide app, and away we drove.

TADA!  We made it! I had heard that people are no longer allowed on the main pyramid, and unfortunately this was true. But it was still very impressive to look at from the base!

Here were some cool carvings, I love the long nose!

We were supposed to wear masks around other people, and there were quite a few other people here! But the kids pulled theirs down to give a smile in front of these columns/ruins:

Another shot of El Castillo - Kukulkan Temple. Amazing!

Cor and Preston by some cool carvings.

It was kind of a long walk around, and I was surprised by the number of vendors that were allowed to set up booths right inside the historic area! But the kids kind of liked looking at the tourist wares for sale, and we did pick up a couple of souvenirs, so we are part of the problem I guess!  But my favorite purchase of the day were some popsicles that were well worth the $$ on another hot, humid day after the long hike out the cenote. Again, the kids loved to hear about how they used to throw people into it as human sacrifices. It was fascinating to learn about the beliefs of the ancient Mayans.

The last day was another relaxing beach day! We also went shopping around Puerto Morelos, and I'm sure we ate more churros. I didn't take a lot of pictures, but Preston and me spent a couple of happy hours wandering down the beach looking for sea glass.  Here is our haul, back at our house:

The next day I got up early and went for a run down the beach. I got up super early to watch the sun rise, and it was such a fun run, and so beautiful! Down the beach there weren't many houses, and I even saw some small conch shells washed up:

Here is the sun, on our last morning!  So sad to leave such a fun, beautiful place!

We had had to get tested for Covid before we could head back (thank goodness we were all negative), and so we headed back to the airport, which was a ZOO! We eventually made it back home, and it was so nice to get away!