Bear Lake

We spent three days at Nate’s parents’ cabin last week. It was a great getaway for our family. We passed the time on the way up and back listening to the Focus on the Family dramatized version of Les Misérables. It was really well done and the kids (except Abby) liked listening to the story. I love that we can introduce them to some of the classics now that they are getting older. We kept everything pretty low-key on this trip. In the past we have spent most of our time at the pools or the beach or the park. This time we mostly hung out at the cabin with just a couple of trips to the pool. It was nice to just relax and spend time together. We discovered our complete lack of badminton skills, spent hours building a puzzle, watched dueling hummingbirds, played lots of games (namely Ticket to Ride, Set, and Speed UNO), watched movies (Next Three Days & Source Code for me and Nate; Phineas and Ferb & National Treasure for the kids; and Napoleon Dynamite for all of us), played volleyball, and went on a morning nature walk. If the kids would have remembered the rule that there is no fighting or whining while on vacation, it would have been perfect. But, even with some fighting and whining, it was still quite lovely.











The least fun part of our trip is that girls found a tick crawling on Abby’s arm on Monday morning. I checked all of the kids for ticks and found a quality bite mark on the back of Abby’s head. I’m glad the tick had already detached itself so I didn’t have to pull it out. With the three I found on Emily in Wyoming, that makes four ticks this summer. I’ll be happy if I never see another one.

One unexpected side-effect of our trip was a rebirth of the kids’ interest in puzzle building. We woke up one morning to find the three oldest kids starting a 1000 piece puzzle. We gave up on building it when we were about half done. It was a pretty lame puzzle. The pieces didn’t lock together well and about 500 of them were slightly varied shades of blue. When we got home, the kids couldn’t wait to build another puzzle. In the last three days we’ve built three 500+ piece puzzles (not to mention all of the 25-60 piece ones that girls have built and rebuilt.) It has been a good way to pass the time on these hot summer days.