Gayle's

We ADORE Aunt Gayle. Like... she may or may not be our favorite person ever. My children spent more time at Gayle's house than anywhere else while on this trip. Not joking, every day, the second they woke up they were asking to go to Gayle's. Im really good mom too cause I totally let them.

 7:30 A.M.??? Ok... go on over to Gayle's. Im sure she LOVED it. ;)

 If you know Gayle though, you know that she actually really did love it. She cherishes every minute she gets with my kids and I love her for it. I never ever have any doubt when I send my kids over that she will be happy and enthusiastic about having them. And she is just too much fun. She does all the stuff with them that I am too lazy to do. She lets them make cupcakes in her kitchen (and when I say "she lets THEM" she really does. She reads the instructions to them and lets them dig in.) She dyes eggs with them and gives them rides on the four-wheelers and lets them trample through her garden "planting" and "watering" She lets them paint and she takes them for walks. She. Is. Amazing. We are So lucky to have her in our lives.

She even took us to her friends house to see baby goats (that we got to bottle feed!) and feed the horses and the chickens and run like mad in her GIANT hay barn.

Gayle is simply the best. Enough said. No words could ever express our feelings about her.

Catching up is Hard to do.

I hate catching up on blog posts! HATE IT!

However I love how cute this picture is...

 We had lots and lots and lots of cousin time (which is hands down our favorite way to spend time) And I have lots and lots of pictures to prove it. However these are ones that just didn't seem to fit in any of my other posts so they are getting their own. The pic above is of a monumental moment. AnDee's first sleep over at her cousin Felicity's house. She was a champ! She did all the things little girls are supposed to do during sleep overs including dressing up, putting on make-up, watching movies and staying up late giggling and giggling. And despite her mothers fear of a middle-of-the-night-call. She slept all night without a problem. I love that she is getting so brave and independant... I also hate it with every fiber of my being.

We went to the children museum at Thanksgiving Point with Aunt Amber and Brigs and Grace. Too fun.

The kids also had a blast with Papa in the yard cause Papa caught them way to many snakes. Pep would play with them for hours (and maybe, possibly killed a few as a result) At one point he found a spider whilst playing with the snake. I told him that those kind of snakes eat spiders.... My mistake. He then became determined to make the snake eat his little snack friend and repeatedly shoved the snakes head into the spider. It was gross and so so wrong. Boys are weird.

 We spent endless amounts of time swinging (with cousins) at Gayle's house. The hammock and the swing are always a big hit.

 We also got a special visit from second cousins... or third... or something. The kicker is that Easton (Ike's friend in the car with him) Is 4... and Ike is 2.... and Ike is a giant and Easton is a midget. They sure had fun together though. They got to ride horses (which I got zero pictures of) and jump on the tramp and ran like crazies all over the place. It was just a good time in general.

Home

Im getting ahead of myself I know. This post is completely out of order. Im putting the last first but I wanted to get this post done so I can move past the anger.
Last week we finally decided it was time to come home. Our trip to Utah for a "couple of weeks" had turned into almost a month and a half. To make a very long story short; Andrew didn't get his surgery. Insurance denied the claim (however they didn't bother to inform us of this until Andrew was literally boarding his plane to fly to Utah for the surgery... which was supposed to be the next day). His Doctor is pretty ticked and is currently fighting our insurance company. We decided to wait it out for a while to see if things would go through so Andrew could come back while we were still there. Needless to say it hasn't gone through and our family needed to be together again and so at 5:30 on Weds morning we jumped in the car with Papa and headed home.
We knew there was a bit of a storm we would have to make it through in northern Utah/SW Wyoming. It really wasn't bad. We were pulling a trailer so going was a little slower than usual but no big deal. We made it to Rawlings and decided to stop for lunch and let the kids/dogs (we brought Hunter home!) stretch and run.
30 minutes later we were back on the road and headed into the depths of hell...
I was trying not to hate Wyoming. I really was. On the drive out to Utah I was even thinking to myself "This isn't so bad. At least there is open space and a few animals" But then we left our nice little lunch break and drove straight in to the single biggest storm I have ever driven through. Once we were out of it we figured it out and the storm (which wasn't even in the weather forecast by the way)  was over 250 miles long. It took us over 4 hours to get as far as we could have in one hour without snow. It was thick, deep snow and of course (because wyoming) windy as all get out.

At one point we were going extremely slow and a crazy truck driver flew past us.... AnDee spoke up "Papa??? Why are we going backwards?" My dad couldn't stop laughing.

Do you see how my windshield wipers are just drawing lines in the snow?

 Its because they were growing weird noses that were not efficient at cleaning windshields.
We had to stop WAY too many times to clear the windshield off so my poor, patient and dedicated father could see well enough to keep us on a road.

We stopped to get gas and had to knock  hundreds of lbs of snow off of the trailer.

When I realized that you could literally SEE in the sky where Wyoming ended and Nebraska began my hatred for the state multiplied.

However... Nebraska wasn't as nice as it looked for the first little while. The wind picked up... and when I say picked up I mean tornado speeds. Then it started hailing... badly and then the lightening went crazy, scary crazy. All joking aside I was just bracing myself for a tornado to drop. So. Much. Fun!?

We ended up having to stop for the night 100's of miles before we'd planned which made for a very long day (again) the next day. The good news is that we got to stay at an awesomely po-dunk and shady little hotel that had actual door keys instead of key cards. Took me way back.

In the end I am just eternally grateful that my dad was with me and driving us through the mess because if I had been alone Im pretty certain I would have just pulled over and cried.