Oh, How I Love to Fix Things!

Remember that time I was in the car and rolled down the passenger window and it suddenly sounded like a water bottle being crushed? 😳 Yikes! The passenger window in the Expedition has always been painfully ssssssslllllllllloooooooooowwwwwwww. I was able to get the window to roll back up and descended upon YouTube and Amazon to start looking for a replacement part. It took a week for the part to come and then I watched small bursts of a YouTube video and took the door apart a teensy bit at a time. That's a complicated door part. Basically, everything is attached to the huge window assembly. But after a little more than an hour, it was the fastest window in the car! It's so fast now! And we saved some bucks because that would've have cost at least $400 in labor. (I know because I called St. George Ford.) Never give up, never surrender!

 

SNOW DAY!

SNOW! We're in a drought so all this fabulous snow is a blessing. I was mean and didn't let the kids skip school because of the snow. But I let them play for an hour before school started.

They made a snow family. :)

I'm throwing in my bruised hand. I was vacuuming the stairs and pulled the vacuum down on my hand. It's the most pain I've been in for a while! After walking it off for a few minutes and opening and closing my hand a few times, I felt that it's going to be fine. The next day the bruise hurt when pressed on but not to open and close my hand so it should heal up. :)

 

Sick Tricks!

My kids are fun to watch. I remember trying to recreate stunts as a kid and my kids are the same way.

Somehow my kids don't get hurt very often and that pleases me as well. 

 

Grand Circle Tour

Merril usually takes Japanese tourists on the Grand Circle Tour but because there haven't been any tourists because of COVID, he took us at a discounted rate. :) We took off over Spring Break and hit Bryce Canyon, Goblin Valley, Moab, by Monument Valley (covid shutdown), Sedona and home.

Bryce Canyon hiking:

Goblin Valley:

Moab and Arches National Park:

Corona Arch:

This sticker was all over signs in Moab. Jimmy on the burger guitar is what we named him.

Mexican Hat:

We drove through Monument Valley but it was on super lock down. We couldn't find a bathroom or a place to eat or nothing. The Navajo Nation has been hit hard with covid. We basically just drove through.

Grand Canyon:

It was cold! Brrrrrrrr! Kids were freezing but we decided to hike along the rim. I dropped off the kids and Merril and drove the car down to the pickup spot. I hiked back up to meet them. I ran into a few of the kids and Mark fell. He was cold and hurt himself so he wanted to be carried. It was still at least a 1/4 mile but we made it back to the car and warmed him up.

We were very underdressed.

Sedona, AZ: 

We arrived in the later afternoon and hurriedly hiked Bell Rock. We all pretended to align our chakras or whatever.

That night it snowed. 

So beautiful!

 

Ellen and her family were also in Sedona, AZ and we met up with them. We brought pizza and salad and took it over to their airbnb and ate and chatted. Some of the kids played in the snow and got very wet, since we didn't have any snow clothes. 

We kept overspending on dinner so we tried an experiment to not spend too much. 

We had some leftover pizza and Merril warmed it up on the heater in the car and brought it to Mark on a Grand Canyon pocket map. Pretty silly.

We left and headed home. We stopped at Hoover Dam and walked out on the bridge. It was very sunny.

I'm not gonna lie. This vacation was a little rough. Merril wanted to show us a bunch of beautiful scenery and I was trying to keep kids quiet with tablets. Merril seemed annoyed at our distracted children and halfway through, we were trying to decide if we even wanted to continue. We kept going but we were all out of sync. The vacation ended on a better note but just so you know, not all vacations are cheery and perfect like it shows in the pictures. 

I Only Have Eyes for You.

This is what happens at dinner: being doofy. The kids were stretching their eyes open and it looked so odd! Juliet took a picture to show me how weird it was. I agree. Crazy weird!

 

Maxine in the St. George High School Art Show.

Maxine has enjoyed her studio art class this year and has created some amazing pieces. One of her pieces was selected for a high school art show at the St. George Art Museum! Merril and I met her art field trip and saw the expo.

The perspective of this piece is interesting although not her favorite medium, pen. It was fun for her to be selected and get to see high school art from around the region. Hurricane High School had a ton of selections, only tying with Tuacahn High School. Great job Maxine!

Craon is Mikayla's Favorite Book Character.

Mikayla has a whole series of books that she's created featuring a crayon named Craon (pronounced like bran). Craon and Mikayla go on all sorts of adventures in her books. When "dress up as your favorite book character" rolled around for Dr. Seuss Week, she wanted to dress up as Craon. So here she is as a pink crayon. I really want her Craon character to be written up in an actual book. I think it would sell!

And so dumb! Juliet really favors Wild Coyote Ranch. It's not shelf stable and to be honest, is the very best ranch dressing. It's expensive though. I did the math on the gallon container and I can save half if I buy this amount. But look at it!!! It seems gross to buy that much ranch dressing. Yuck! But now we can eat the best ranch there is and I don't have to sweat every time I buy a pint.