Maxine got the Vaccine

I didn't say a word to her. She just came home one day and said she had gotten the covid vaccine. She had a sore arm but didn't feel bad. Sounds good!

 

El Mirage

Merril and his buddies went down to El Mirage, a dry lake bed in California, to see how fast they could go on some of their fast bikes. Merril took a red Ducati that he bought to flip.

There's Shawn.

Ryan was down there too. They took dirt bikes too because they went to Dumont Dunes as well. 

That place is gorgeous in the Spring but SOOOOOO hot in the summer. 

 

Black Sabbatical Concert on a Rooftop

Merril and his band, Black Sabbatical, played on the rooftop of a new building at the university. The concert raised money for the Dove Center in St. George. They were staring straight into the sun but it was fun after the sun went down. 

Merril had Maxine play a few songs as an opener. Jack sang a song at the end of the night but his voice is a little unpredictable still. Half way through the song, it started cracking a lot. Oh well, still a fun way to spend Merril's birthday! He's 43!

 

Senior Prom 2021!

Maxine was asked to Senior Prom and we had to find a dress! We went to Suzy's Closet to look for dresses to rent. We ended up purchasing one of the dresses on clearance. It needed sleeves, I wish I had an actual before picture. This one already has the sleeves on. Maxine showed me pictures of what she envisioned the dress the look like and I was skeptical that it would look good. I didn't have the vision.

Maxine was able to cut parts of the flowers and applique them to the sleeves. It helped the sleeves seem like they were part of the dress and tie it together. I washed and air dried it. It looked ghostly.

And Maxine asked if I would take pictures. That makes me nervous but they turned out. I really do love pictures.

Maxine's date was a new kid in robotics named Jacob Arnold.

The kids were cute and fun and Maxine got a ton of compliments on her sleeves. Yay! I'm glad she had the vision and the gumption to pull it off.

We Got Some Butterflies!

I asked Mark if the class was hatching butterflies this spring and he they didn't have any in his classroom! Shocked, I asked Mikayla if she remembered the butterflies in first grade. She said she didn't have butterflies in first grade either. WHAT?! Jill Foy, Valerie Scott's Mom, was a teacher at Coral Canyon before she passed away and the first grade team had a butterfly unit. They learned about caterpillars and butterflies and then purchased caterpillars and watched them change and released them as butterflies.

Since Coral Canyon wasn't doing this anymore, I decided that we should purchase them as a family and watch them change. They were cooler than I thought they'd be! Most have formed a chrysalis. They were so small when they came in the mail.

We moved them to the butterfly cage when they were all cocoons. Then it was time to wait until they started to emerge as butterflies.

It was pretty cool!

Mikayla liked how they let you hold them. She said it's super cool!

 

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.