July 2011

July is always such a fun month. After we thought we had our housesitters settled in at our little farm, we drove our overloaded car southeast. Actually, considering how overloaded it was LAST year (we had Aniva, Josh and Ponyo and all their luggage with us), it wasn’t that loaded, but it always FEELs overloaded no matter what. Anyway, we have made the drive from Washington to Utah so many times now (12 years in a row now, minus one year we were in NZ) that we have all our favorite campsites and places to get veggie oil for the car. Here are the kids at the Deschutes River campground at the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge. Ana let me go all Girls’ Camp on her hair and put it in 20 braids.

 

We spent the night at Three Rivers Crossing S.P. in Idaho (which used to be one of our favorites, but the price went up, so it’s been stricken from the list) where Elsie got royally freaked out by the old scary mannequins in their brand new Oregon Trail museum. Then we rushed to Pocatello to hit Costco big time and rushed down to Bear Lake to get unloaded before our friends the Cobines showed up. Well, we did stop for awhile at Soda Springs (to fill up the car with oil) and just had to take some Throw Up Pictures when the geyser went off. But other than that, we were rushing. Especially because Elsie was completely totally smashed by all the Costco groceries. Only her head was able to move, and somehow she got the marshmallow bag close to her mouth and chewed on some while they were still in the plastic.

 

So happy for the sun and sand at Bear Lake! The water was up SO high this year, which I loved (except for the speeding four wheelers who had no big beach to ride on so would come do doughnuts on my kids’ sand castles… grrrrrr), especially because I would have died carrying this 20 pounder from the house all the way across the 1/4 mile of sand that has made up the beach for the last 8 years. BUT, look at all those 20 pounds of cuteness!

 

Elsie loves the beach and sand. She especially loves making sand angels, which makes clean up at the end of the day so fun for me.

 

Of course I managed to take no photos of the Cobines or the many other Eyres who were there for the 4th of July, but we had a grand little party to celebrate USA!

 

After the 4th, the rest of the Eyres (Jonah has 8 siblings and 17 nieces and nephews (soon to be 19!)) made their way to the Lake. Of course, my kids were in their truest version of HEAVEN. (Jonah and I were pretty darn happy too…).

The cousins all get along amazingly well…

 

most of the time.

My sisters-in-law are all amazing, famous, gorgeous, wonderful bloggers, so you really should check out their Bear Lake posts to get a more well-rounded account:

Shawni’s gives a good account of how it all works with this many people:  http://www.71toes.com/2011/08/reunion-and-how-we-do-it.html

http://www.71toes.com/2009/07/bear-lake-highlights.html

http://www.71toes.com/2011/08/bear-lake-entertainment.html

Another great perspective from Saren: http://looslifamily.blogspot.com/2011/07/latest-bear-lake-adventures.html

http://looslifamily.blogspot.com/2010/07/bear-lake-so-far.html

Saydi also throws down a great blog: http://bostonshumways.blogspot.com/2011/07/bear-lake-in-pictures.html

And Charity is the most awesome writer in the whole world. She is also gorgeous and wonderful and SINGLE!

But, I can’t find her Bear Lake post, so just read her whole blog:

http://drippingwithpassion.blogspot.com/

And of course my mother-in-law’s: eyrealm.blogspot.com

My best-in-the-world sisters-in-law-law (Jonah’s brothers’ wives) haven’t blogged about Bear Lake yet, but now that I’ve blogged, I’m sure they will get RIGHT on it. They were just waiting for me to set the standard.

 

Poem was infinitely delighted with all the people to coo over her, hold her, feed her, smile at her, make her laugh… she is so social and so happy. She even for 12 hours straight one night because she was so content.

 

 

Elsie loved all the aunts and uncles. LOVED. She also loves dance parties.

 

 

 

Here’s Jonah with his brothers and brothers-from-other-mothers (but married to his sisters). Jonah is the strongest.

 

We also had a very sublime experience when Poem Terese was blessed up at the Lighthouse. This is normally done in a church when babies are just new, but we decided to wait so we could have more family with us. Also, Jonah wanted to make sure she had the right name before he blessed her. She does.

 

This was the last weekend that Ana had glasses, because she got contacts a few days after this photo was taken. YAY! Now she can see while doing all her crazy sports!

 

 

Ana takes after her dad in the loving-to-waterski department. She even learned to drop a ski and ski on just one ski. Unfortunately, every time I tried to take a picture of her doing it, she would crash. Here she is with her twin cousin Grace who is wakeboarding.

 

We took a two day vacation from Bear Lake to go stay in Jonah’s parents’ new condo in downtown Salt Lake and it was a 4-star vacation (except when we locked the keys in the car in front of the condo building). So much fun. The kids and I took the Trax to the SLC Library (huge and has glass elevators), a German bakery, and many other random places we had never explored. His parents live in Park City most of the time, so we generally spend most of our time in SLC there or by their old house by the zoo, so it was good to have a few days with just our little family to see the downtown.

On our way back to Bear Lake, we met up with Jonah’s mom in Logan to visit Jonah’s Grandma Ruthie and to deliver Cam to Grammy Camp (see here: http://eyrealm.blogspot.com/2011/07/grammie-camp-2.html) . Po LOVED her Grandma Great. Grandma’s memory is getting thin, but she’s still so fun and funny when we come to visit.

 

Sadly, it came time for us to leave. My dad had made a last minute trip to Bend, Oregon, which was sort of on the way home, so we decided to make a run for it and get there while he was still there since we had never been. Plus, we were getting a hint that our housesitters were not as stellar as we had thought they would be, so we were anxious to get home and get that sorted.

 

Again, I managed to somehow lose or never-have-in-the-first-place ANY photos from our four days in Bend. But, my dad’s house there is darling and we had a truly magical time exploring the city. It is a town full of character and simply lovely residential architecture. We will have to go back many more times.

 

Since Bend isn’t on our usual route to Washington, we got to explore some new territory. Here is a new favorite campground along the Hood River.

 

 

Columbia River during our 7 MILE HIKE (yes, the kids hated me after that. Whoops. It didn’t look so long on the map!).

Once we got to the Columbia River (after going through the Hood River Valley where we bought the most amazing cherries I’ve ever had the pleasure of tasting), we had to stay at Ainsworth State Park because even though the road noise can be bad, how can you resist being so close to so many waterfalls?

 

 

The Columbia River Gorge from the Vista House. One of the most beautiful places on earth!

 

 

We made such fast progress on the drive home that we were going to be home a day earlier than we told the housesitters we would be, so we camped the last night about an hour from our house on the Hood Canal (no relation to Hood River). It was called Seal Rock and it is another coastal wonderland of Washington. Here is Elsie with a baby baby crab… ahhhhh, so cute!

We finally made it home after being gone for about three weeks. Our housesitters were STILL in our house when we got there. This wouldn’t be such a big deal except they had moved  TWO big UHaul truck (not trailer, truck!) loads into our small house and onto the lawn. They were in between moving out of their old house and finding a new house and they used our house as their dumping grounds. Again, would not have been that big of a deal except that we had, three months prior to this, decided to move to Hawaii… thus, our house was up for sale. But, it isn’t easy to sell a house with JUNK EVERYWHERE. Plus, I only had four things they needed to do: watch over the chickens (they didn’t even have to feed them—that was taken care of), keep the electric fence on so the sheep wouldn’t eat the garden and flowers, pet the cat so she wouldn’t go wandering, and mow and water the lawn. WELL, 8 chickens died/went missing. The electric fence got unplugged somehow just a few days after they got there and after the sheep figured out how good the flowers taste on the other side, they were uncontainable. The housesitters didn’t even start staying at our house until a WEEK after we left (NOT part of the agreement), so the cat thought she was abandoned and wandered off and GOT PREGNANT. AND, not only did they NOT water or mow the lawn (well, they mowed it once), but they had all their stuff on it and it died. Nice. (WHEW! Now that I have finally vented in writing, I feel much better.) I don’t want to turn you all off to housesitters, because our housesitter from 2010 was a dream… but be wary, because even very very nice people can be bad housesitters.

I didn’t get mad at them or anything because it wouldn’t have helped anything, and I’ve been in limbo situations like they were so I know the trauma they were feeling… but still. It was pretty bad. I think they could tell I was mad. My kids pretty much started crying when they got home and saw what a disaster had landed.

Luckily we were stern enough to encourage them to take MOST of the stuff off the property over the 12 hours after we got home so that we could show the house to the perspective buyers who had wanted to look at the house two weeks prior but the housesitters wouldn’t allow them to come over… and it ended well because those same people who came over that day after we got back from our journeys were the same people who ended up buying the house. Yay!

 

So, July. You were good to us as always. XOXO.