First Week Home

Transitioning from our week in Utah has been a little rough.  We’ve all agreed that one week was too short to be ready to go home.  It takes us two weeks to feel that pull to return to normalcy.

We’ve also had the hardest getting everyone back on EST.  Being two hours behind the rest of the world and having kids up past 9pm and awake at 6:30am (with lots of middle of the night activity to boot) hasn’t been my absolute favorite.

BUT there have been some wonderful wonderful moments:

A perk of feeding the birds all spring is that a few of the seeds turn into sunflowers.  We returned with them in full bloom.  Emily picked a few petals off of them and when I asked her about it she said, “Oh, I asked them and they didn’t mind.”

A few days later Emily headed out with scissors and vase and returned with a beautiful bouquet.  I love how much she loves flowers.  And I love that she brings them into our home and cheers up the place!

Emily found some feathers and she wanted to try writing like the pioneers did.  I happened to have an inkwell from my high school days that I pulled out.  We all wrote for a bit and it was a really neat experience.  Emily loved it and has been asking to do it every single day but it was pretty intense clean-up and monitoring for me so we haven’t done it again yet.

Nathan is really into firetrucks right now.  Before we left for on our trip he figured out how to turn the couch into a firetruck.  He would carefully balance his broom on pillows and he asked me to tape a little disc to the broom so he could steer.  I obliged the first time but had no desire to repeat that process.  Plus it was frustrating for him because his structure kept falling apart.  So we came up with an improved design with a lid of a pan in a box that makes an excellent steering wheel.  He sets up his truck complete with a door. He also wears his fireman hat for a good portion of each day.

Nathan hasn’t had any interest in riding the balance bike because he loves his “car bike” so much.  His knees are almost dragging on the ground so on Saturday I insisted that he just sit on the balance bike seat with me.  That’s all it took and he is hooked! He wants to ride all the time and is starting to pick up speed. It’s so fun to see the two of them biking together.  We also raised Emily’s seat up about 6 inches so that her bike is more comfortable to ride.

I came downstairs to Nathan tied up.  When I asked the kids what was going on they said Nathan was the tree of life and the string was the iron rod.  Earlier in the week it had been a rock climbing harness and rope to rappel down the pickler triangle, inspired by our climb at Big Cottonwood canyon.

Laura is finally old enough to go on smooth, slow rides on the bike path in the bike trailer!  Nathan’s favorite thing is to ride in the trailer and he puts on his own shoes and jumps right in without any help from me.  The last two days Emily has biked with me and does a great job, especially because she does about 50 rotations to my every 1.  Nathan and Emily both love what they get to do on family bike rides and Laura loves that she gets to sit next to Nathan.