Back in Utah

I am shamelessly behind and I'll address that later, but for now we are in Utah for three weeks and here is what we did yesterday.

My sister & I spent the day with our cumulative five children at our parents' place in Midway. We took them swimming and read books out on the lawn and ate peanut-butter sandwiches.

{Side note: Can I just rave about how wonderful it is that here you can go outdoors at ANY TIME OF DAY for AS LONG AS YOU WANT??? It's amazing! I love it so much I don't even want to come inside except when bribed with a fudgesicle. Also you can go running pretty much anytime during the day, not just before 7 a.m. like in Maryland. I logged 4 miles yesterday without even breaking a sweat! Okay fine I was pretty sweaty. But still conscious!}

Where was I? Oh yes, so then in the afternoon we thought we would take the kids to a historic ranch a couple miles up the road. It's called Huber Grove, and it's a charming little place that's been preserved and spattered with little placards giving interesting little tidbits about the ranch and family who lived there. Like this:

My mom stumbled across this place on her own run that morning and told us we should take the kids.

This endeavor was interesting (well, the two of us wrangling 5 kids ages 4 and under is always interesting) since we had one car intended to seat six. You can do the math and figure out if we should have been arrested, but I'll just say we were driving very carefully, slowly, and a short distance, and we did make good use of the seat belts. Anyway, when planning the outing I believe my sister's exact words were, "They need to get out and run around." I agreed. But when she started up the trail with the kids and I was back at the car wedging Troy into the front carrier, she read the first placard and called back that we might have chosen the wrong place.

"A place to be still"?

Um... right.

Anyway we loved looking around, enjoying the gorgeous view and the crisp clean air and imagining what it would have been like 100 years ago to be the first settlers in these mountains. We both admitted that we're small-town country girls at heart. Give me this over a big city any day. No matter how many Targets you throw in.

This is the creamery. They had designed it with two-foot-thick walls that allowed the stream to flow through the lower level to cool the dairy products. My little niece quickly scrambled up that rock wall to the right, picked up a rock, and threw it down below, unknowingly unearthing a colony of angry ants. When she saw them scurrying around frantically, maybe even up her legs (I couldn't tell), she dropped to the ground and started screaming and flailing. It was crazy because this little girl has never had an emotional outburst in her life to my knowledge! (We quickly rescued her.) My other favorite part was when my little 16-month-old nephew decided to forgo the stepping stone over the little creek (it was maybe 6 inches across) and plunged right through. He didn't even seem to notice. And in classic fashion, Brooklyn followed suit only moments later.

We also enjoyed checking out the outhouse. Thank goodness for indoor plumbing!!! Can you imagine potty-training nine children here, when it snows several feet more than half the year? YIKES!

We didn't stay long or take many pictures, but those kids sure had fun getting out and running around! In a "still" way, of course.

We ended the evening with a summer concert on the lawn at the Homestead, which was the perfect summer evening activity in my opinion. That is, until a rogue rainstorm chased us home! Ah well!

I'll catch up on more of our adventures later!