The End (with extras)

It's been two days now, but I wanted to post the last few pictures of our visit from Britta and Emmaline. It was a fun vacation from the ordinary, but I confess, it's been nice to get everything back to normal. It is especially nice that Jane has her own room back--she's not in our room anymore! Yay! And it is also nice to only have to deal with one screaming child instead of two...I guess I should enjoy it while I can. October isn't very far away.

You may have noticed from earlier posts that our activities were pretty laid back. On their last full day in Logan, we opted to get out of the house at least for a little while, so we headed over to Ryan's Place park in River Heights. Great park, by the way.


Jane's favorite activity, as usual, was the swings.


Emmaline, on the other hand, seemed content to just push the swing without ever getting in.


We never really could get them to face the same direction at the same time. They would both smile and say "cheese!" for the pictures, but they were almost always looking in opposite directions. Maybe Britta and I needed to stand closer together so they didn't get confused where to look...


...or you can let Jane fall over on top of Emmaline and tell them they have to wait for Mom to get the camera before we'll help them up!


In case you didn't know, Ryan's Place was built entirely by volunteers and donations in memory of a young boy who died. All the fence posts name people who helped. I kept hoping that I would find the name of at least one person who I knew. This was as close as I got...and I don't know if it counts. I've never actually met Ryan Shupe...but I've heard his songs and seen him in concert. Is that the same?


After our adventures in the park, we did a little window shopping at Hobby Lobby (not a whole lot there I would actually spend money on, but a fun place to wander) and went out to lunch at Village Inn. That was an adventure in and of itself. It was the waitress's first day and she sat us all at a table meant for only two people--we ended up having to move a bunch of stuff to the empty table next to us to get it out of the hands of the girls. But, it was fun anyway.

And that was about it. Who knows when we will all get together again...but at least Jane and Emmaline had a lot of happy moments between the screaming!


P.S. I ended up borrowing the extra car seat from my mom. It was my brother Michael's. He's 11 now--who knows why the car seat is still hanging around! But it worked out quite well. Thanks, Mom. Sorry I forgot to give it back. It's in my garage if you need it.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

After taking Britta and Emmaline to the airport on Thursday morning, Jane and I visited my mom at work so she could show us off to all her co-workers. She wanted to show off Jane because she's her cute granddaughter and she wanted to show off me because I'm the one that finally got her on April Fool's--see, I told you it was a big deal.

Anyway, on our way home, the sky looked really weird. I had to stop to buy gas in Brigham City and I took that opportunity to take some pictures. This was the sky to the east, the direction I was headed at that point.


You can tell that it isn't completely clear and that the wind was pretty strong, but other than that, not terribly remarkable, right? Well, here was the sky to the west.


There was a very clear line of where it changed, too.


It wasn't until I watched the news later that night that I found out it was caused by a large fire in Tooele. The winds were strong enough to bring all the smoke as far as Brigham City and even past the mountains into Cache Valley. I'm sure the major thunderstorm moving through had something to do with it. And the storm probably helped clear it up faster, too. But I did manage to get some pretty cool shots of the sun through the smoke. It's not every day you can look right at the sun like that.