Spoiled Rotten, Really I Am

Last summer, when I was dreaming about buying a house someday, and we were figuring out when we might be able to do so, we planned a trip to Disneyland this Spring, since our plans were to wait until later this summer to start house hunting. We decided that we would go, then we made our hotel reservations early so they would be cheap, and then we left it at that.

Fast forward to this January when we started looking for a house and found our wonderfully fabulous home on the first day - this is when I had a few tiny moments of sanity where I was actually the one saying, "We shouldn't go to Disneyland. It's going to stretch things too far," and Brian was the one saying, "Let's see what we can do. It's great to go when the kids are still young enough for it to be special to them."At this point we had only made our hotel reservations, and we could cancel them at any time without penalty, so we just went ahead and kept them, but we could still back out if we needed to.

So ever since Brian started working last summer, he's been in charge of taking care of the office computers and printers, and apparently he's been doing such a good job at it that they haven't once had to call the guy they used to have fixing the computers since Brian started working there. When Dan and Bruce heard that we wanted to go on a vacation, they very nicely let Brian cash out the reward points on the office credit card to help pay for the trip, as a special thank you. It completely blew me away! Dan said it's just proof that Family Eye Care loves Brian, and it actually gave me one more reason to love the fact that Brian works for them.

So long story short, we went to Disneyland last week! Yea! It was a miracle that the vacation even happened, and the whole thing lived up to it's miraculous expectations. It was fabulous!

DAY 1
We left bright and early Friday morning. I say "bright and early" in reference to Brian. I wanted to leave at 5:00, and he said absolutely not, and we ended up leaving around 7:30. We kept the trip a secret at first, since we didn't know if it would be happening or not, but then we went ahead and kept it a surprise for the kids, and they didn't even know we were going anywhere until we woke them up and said, "Let's get in the car and get going." It was so fun fun to watch them get dressed and ready and keep asking, "What's going on? Where are we going?" I made a workbook for Alyssa with maps and such, and it had worksheets in it for each leg of our trip for her to figure out where we were going. As she was figuring out the first one, she kept guessing our destination.

"We are d- D! We're going to Disneyland!"

Me and Brian, "No, keep going."

"We are driving to S- Silverwood! We're going to Silverwood!"

Again, "No, keep going."

"We are driving to Salt Lake City, Utah. Utah! That's where Callie and Cecily live!" We were glad that she was just as excited to see her cousins as she was to the possibly of going to Disneyland or Silverwood.

We were surprised to find that it was snowing on Cabbage Hill, and we stopped for a very cold and very quick picnic breakfast at one of the rest areas.

Brian and Ethan braved the cold.

Marcus and Alyssa were the pansies who stayed in the warm car.

It was crazy-windy on the drive down. For the whole trip we actually drove through almost every weather possibility imaginable: snow, wind, rain, blizzard snow, sleet, hail, and intense heat. It was great!

We stopped at Tucanos in Boise, Idaho for lunch. We were planning on hitting a Tucanos or Rodizios in Utah, since Brian loves churrascos, but we hit Boise around lunch time (perfect!) and lunch is cheaper than dinner (even perfecter!). We were way impressed at the quality of the salad bar, which they actually called a "salad festival" for obvious reasons, and we thoroughly enjoyed our stop. Although Brian spent the rest of the drive saying, "I ate way too much."

During lunch Marcus was doing this crazy thing where he would stick a raisin in his mouth and dance to the music and make silly faces.

We got into Salt Lake City around 7:45 and after some confusion with our hotel room we met up with Brian's cousin's family for ice cream. The hotel confusion was that they put us in a room with one king-sized bed, and when Brian called the front desk to say we needed two queens, they said they must have changed the beds in that room without changing the information in the computer, and after having the same problem when we moved our luggage into two other rooms, they just ended up putting us in a suite, since they were guaranteed to have two queen beds. It was nice to be able to send the kids into the sitting room the next morning to watch cartoons while Brian and I slept in.

Back to ice cream: Brian's cousin, Scott, is graduating from the University of Utah, and he and Alexia have two beautiful children (Ethan and Emmery) who are just between Ethan and Marcus in age. It was so fun to get together with them. Up until now we've only seen pictures of their kids, and we were only able to see Scott and Alexia briefly at Mark's wedding a couple of months ago. We went to a Nielson's Frozen Custard, because Brian used to love to go there when he was single, but it was freezing cold and they didn't have tables inside, so we didn't end up staying for long. Scott and Alexia said they should be coming up to the Northwest to visit soon, so we're looking forward to that!

Day 2
The next morning we slept in, then put on our jackets to brave the weather and visit Temple Square. We took a tour of the Conference Center, which was amazing. The lady giving the tour was so nice. She and Alyssa had a great time talking with each other. The kids were very well-behaved, although the boys got bored toward the end and just wanted to run around the roof.

The artwork in the Conference Center is amazing! There were so many beautiful pieces depicting the Savior, Joseph Smith, the prophets, stories from the Book of Mormon and the Bible - I would love to go back either without the kids someday or when they're older, so we can spend more time looking at everything. It was all so gorgeous!

We almost weren't able to go on the roof, because of the rain, but luckily they let us. Brian and I were married in the Salt Lake Temple, so it was fun to show it to the kids.

Alyssa loved all of the flowers at Temple Square.

After visiting the temple we headed to visit Brian's mission president and his wife. I loved them! They treated us just like we were their children or grandchildren coming for a visit. Brian told the kids that we would just stop to say hello, and we ended up staying the entire afternoon! It was so much fun. They showed us the movie "The Errand of Angels," which their daughter-in-law wrote about her mission experience. (It's very good - you should watch it. I watched the whole thing while Brian visited and the kids played in the toy room.) They fed us lunch and root beer floats, and the kids made themselves very much at home. Brian had a great time catching up with them and hearing about news from all of his mission buddies.

I don't have any pictures of the next part of our visit, because we were having so much fun to think about taking any. After visiting with the Johnson's, we ordered pizza from Brick Oven Pizza (do you see the theme of eating at all of our old favorite places?) and headed to my brother's house. He just graduated from BYU's MBA program, and they were getting ready to sell their townhouse, so we helped with that a bit after eating dinner. Philip was putting in new light fixtures in the bathroom upstairs, so Brian helped him with that, and Erin is pregnant and extremely sick, so I helped straighten up the girls' bedroom while she laid on the bed and gave me directions. Then the guys played a word-type game on the computer while Erin and I talked. Oh, and all the while the kids were in the basement playing, and we didn't have one single argument the whole time!

We didn't leave Erin and Phil's house until 11:00, and we were exhausted. We stayed in Orem that night, and woke up to snow on our car the next morning.

Day 3 - coming soon