March 2017

Let's start off the month with some car karaoke, courtesy of Ella


loser! desert bloom time!

 also fresh orange juice time! As usual, only one of our trees produced (they seem to alternate) but we had so many oranges this year, we made tons of juice and froze it, also gave lots of oranges away, and still had too many. This year we think we'll have even more because it seems like both trees are producing, plus we have our first crop of lemons too, yay!

Riding bikes with the girls is quite the chore. Neither of them are comfortable riding on the sidewalk without a hand on them because of all the dips on the driveways. I am eager to force them into no training wheels so they'll balance!

much anticipated SpRiNg BrEaK 2017!!

 we met Daddy for lunch before our visitors arrived!

Ella loves snapchat filters (that means it puts funny makeup, or faces, or accessories over your face in the picture) she doesn't have a nose ring in real life, Grandma.

Then Spring break became one for the books. Jessie came to town with her three kids and they stayed with us for four nights. It was action packed adventure and giggles for everyone!

non stop slumber party at our house!

 Jessie has Sophia (7) Vivienne (5, almost 6) and Maddox (3). Eva and Viv are both in Kindergarten and got along very well, they sort of reminded me of a young Em and Jessie...bossing everyone around.

We had high hopes for a successful orange juice stand (fresh squeezed even!), but no such luck this time. They gave their best effort though! They earned $1 and an 'interesting' passerby gave them gold spray painted peanut shells that he just happened to have in his pocket.

I think this says juice and brownies.

"I love juice, yay, yummy. Brownies are good" (it looks like brains are good ha!)

Eventually we gave up and went to the splash pad before our teatime at the American Girl bistro

Maria, Lori and Bill were also in town in Mesa for Cubs spring training. Maria introduced all the kids to our old swimming games from summers past. I had forgotten about most of these!

and we went for a hike in Papago park (near the zoo).

Then spring break was over :(  It was so much fun though!

Wanna know how I know she's my child? She runs into walls.

Whenever we find a fly, Ella says it's her friend Fly-Away.

Out of nowhere it seems Ella is quite smart. She is writing things all the time on her own.

 She hated it...it was too 'poofy'.

a while back I twisted my ankle, which was no big deal because I truly twist it all the time and it's always fine. But this one time I woke up the next day and could not put a single ounce of weight on it, I literally crawled to the bathroom. After about an hour it was fine, and from then on every morning it was painful but not unbearable until I really got going, but since it always felt fine eventually I didn't give it a second thought. Well fast forward to two weeks before our alleged half marathon in Zion, I decided I needed to either train for the run for real (because I had been majorly slacking), or find a legitimate reason not to run (muahahaha). Well, luckily for me, my achilles tendon started hurting so bad, likely as a result of walking weird every morning to overcompensate for my morning ankle pain, so I went and saw a doctor who told me I had incredible bendability in my ankles, asked if I always twisted them, and told me it was about 3x as bendy as ankles are supposed to be (he used a real doctor term, I just don't remember it). He gave me this awesome, legitimate looking brace, and I actually wore it for two weeks, even to bed, and it worked! I felt way better by the time of our trip, however I had not trained, errr, I mean I was injured, so I didn't run, but I was still able to hike. I think I could have probably ran if we didn't have the hikes planned too, but I felt like I'd probably need to choose one or the other, and hikes were definitely more appealing.

But rewind back to two weeks before Zion...Eli continues to train for the Grand Canyon rim to rim hike coming up.

 he found random construction equipment, so of course it needed to be driven.

The girls are helping cut grass.

Eva's class had a field trip to a farm. We got to pick lots of vegetables.

Eva with her BFF Sadie

This was just a funny picture, Ella would spin all around on these spinny seats.

she dresses herself

March ended with Jeff and Mary coming out, and Eli and I headed to Zion, Utah. Originally we were going there to run a half marathon, but due to Eli's knee injury and my ankle, we chose to pass on the marathon so we'd be able to make it through the various hikes we wanted to do. The awesome one we did was called Angel's Landing. It was quite terrifying! I'll get to that momentarily..

Ella and Papa worked on puzzles all day, and she was so proud!

 Eli and I departed to Zion. It was a beautiful drive. Here is a storm approaching.

It was bizarre to pass through a hail/snow (grapple we think...like slush balls)

and then real snow near the north rim of the Grand Canyon. 

 This was our house for the weekend. As we were driving around town, I kept seeing signs for Best Friends animal sanctuary. Eventually I realized why Kanab and Best Friends sounded so familiar, and thanks to Facebook, I was able to confirm that my cousin Jodi lived minutes from our rental! We were able to meet up for dinner too! But here is our rental house, right off a little mountain.

 We were meeting up with two of Eli's coworkers. Originally a bunch of people all said they wanted to do the half in Zion but it ended up selling out super fast, so only four of us went. And of the four of us, only one actually ended up running! She said it was the worst half marathon of her life, it was almost all mud running due to the insane amount of rain they had received, and this year the course was different, not through the parks as past years, but in random fields outside of the park...so all in all, I sure am glad I was injured! It was raining/snowing as she left for the race and it ended up being delayed 2 hours because of it. But on the bright side, she marked Utah off her list (she is halfway through running a half in every state) and the weather cleared up just in time for us to hike!

 This is the beginning of Angel's Landing. It's an incredibly scary hike where about 22 people die each year from falling off the mountain. There are chains that you need to hold on to for several parts of it, but people are going up as others are going down, and sometimes you really need to just wait, so you're standing there, staring down at death, waiting for people to pass you. And basically your safety also depends on other people's choices and safe movements. This part below was the beginning, but the traffic made one of the girls with us opt out.  But our half marathon runner, Jenn, figured she'd be the ultimate rockstar and do it with Eli and me (this was just an hour or so after finishing her half marathon)

 Don't look Mom!

 It was wider than it looks...totally safe doing a cartwheel up there. (also, this isn't the very top, that was too narrow for a cartwheel)

 If you look very closely, you'll see the people going up/down this ridge (pictures above and below)

 Above is the Narrows, which we couldn't do because the water was too high (we knew that going in though, you could only go to the entrance)

Zion was a really beautiful park. We will definitely go back. I would absolutely do Angel's Landing again, Eli said he would just mark that off his list, but he also isn't very fond of heights.