When we went on our family trip last year, we thought it might be our last one with Malachi, but since he didn't leave till mid-summer, we managed to fit this year's trip in before he left! A bonus trip with Ky. So good.
Fortunately, we found a rental house in St. George to make it quick and easy enough to do between everything else that had to happen this summer!
Unfortunately, that also meant we'd be in St. George in July, which is…not the ideal time to visit. The temperature while we were there was consistently 108º.
Fortunately, we had a house with a swimming pool!
So, we spent the entire week in the pool. I am not exaggerating. We did not do ANYTHING else. No hiking. No sightseeing. No museums. No Jacob Hamblin home (sorry, Mom) (though it was excessively enjoyable to tell Malachi on several different occasions that we were going to go there😈) (Malachi has a particular loathing for the Jacob Hamblin Home and all other pioneer homes, I'm very sorry to say, due to being dragged through them one too many times on various trips with my mom in the past. My mother does love a pioneer home). ONLY swimming for the entire week. And it was heavenly!
Before we left home we had many errands to do because we'd be back on Saturday and Ky's farewell was going to be on the Sunday. So we were dropping off a suit for dry cleaning, practicing our musical number, taking Amazon returns to UPS, picking up last groceries, etc—and Ziggy was very annoyed about it. We were all laughing about his grumpiness, which of course made him even grumpier! Poor lamb. He kept saying, "STOP BEING FUNNY! I'M NOT IN FUNNY MOOD!" So we all tried to be grumpy instead. Here are all the big kids showing their sympathetic grumpy faces. For some reason, even this didn't help Ziggy feel better…
Everyone had cheered up a bit by the time we got to our usual stopping place in Cedar City. We like to get scones here. Only two children had to have a little time out on the curb outside before rejoining the bosom of their loving family! We won't mention whom.
Our house was in Ivins, out on a different end of it than we'd been to before. The views out there were beautiful! A few hours after we arrived we realized that somehow…Malachi's suitcase hadn't made it into the car. (There was much controversy about it. Certain people had been told to double-check and make sure all the suitcases had made it in. Certain people should also have loaded their suitcases when told to do so, and not had to be double-checked upon. Suffice it to say that I do not know if the child who was most berated for this occurrence was the one who most deserved to be berated.) Luckily Malachi had his laptop in his backpack so he could work on his farewell talk. And he had his swimming suit in there too. So we just went to Target the next day and got him a couple extra shirts and shorts and a toothbrush, and it turned out fine.
By some stroke of luck, Sebastian had the Thursday and Friday off of work and was able to get a couple extra days off around that. So he flew in to St. George using his flight benefits and we picked him up on the second day. It was really fun to have him there with us! Abe, sadly, couldn't take time off from his two jobs up at BYU to join us. We missed him.
The house was cute. We liked the garage game room and the little bunk bed room.
Ziggy loved the foxes everywhere (kind of a woodland animal theme).
But of course, best of all was the pool! It even had a slide!
It was nicest at night. During the day, it was pretty hot even being in the water! The air didn't cool off much at night, but it was enough to feel pleasant when you were wet.
Daisy was so pleased with the fact that when she wore these sandals in the water, her feet floated! She wouldn't stop talking about it. "I call them 'the floating marvels!'" she said proudly.
The slide stopped working from time to time, but it was super fun when it was on!
At dusk every night we saw lots of bats (we love seeing bats)
I suppose it's not strictly accurate to say we ONLY swam all week. We did get groceries, of course, and cooked meals. We went to the temple (baptisms for the girls, sealings for Sam and Malachi and me). We played other games in the house, and pickleball outside when we could stand it. And we went out to eat out twice. So we had plenty of fun!
Silliness in the car
Wad, Malachi's platypus, came with us
This horrible singing ice cream cart figured prominently in Clementine's playtime. She memorized its whole little spoken routine within the first few hours, naturally. Then she would fight with it. It would chirp out a syrupy "Hi! Now scoop the ice cream! Say it with me!" and Clementine would say crossly, "No! I won't!"
Making strawberry milkshakes! Not quite like Oregon but still good.
The kids found several interesting and pretty beetles.
Plus a dead bird they were fascinated with. They named it and wanted to bury it, but, not feeling authorized to dig up the rental house yard (if we could have even found a place not too rocky to do so), Sam had to just…quietly dispose of it without telling the kids how. Alas, poor Feench.
I believe Malachi and I were the ultimate pickleball champions, in spite of my never having played before. Both of us are good at ping-pong, that's the key.
I don't know why the raised hands. Probably Sam had said "Who still wants another piece of pizza?"
I bent my toe a weird way while getting out of the pool and it hurt a TON. It swelled up and turned purple, but honestly didn't look nearly as bad as I would have liked it to. Still, that didn't stop me from saying frequently to whoever was closest, "Would you like to see how my toe is today?" Everyone did a good job tsk-ing and murmuring sympathetically, as they should.
Daisy always loves the "tiny" (but only compared to our usual enormous sizes) groceries we get on trips.
There were far too many "tip-the-person-off-the-donut" games for my taste, but I guess Malachi really did mostly bring most of his misfortunes upon himself.
Naps are always extra good after lots of swimming!
And that was pretty much that! Sebastian flew from St. George airport back to Denver, and took Goldie with him (she's free on the flight benefits this year, and he was coming back to SLC the next day for Ky's farewell). The rest of us had to go the slow and hot way, in the van! But we did get to stop and get ice cream in Beaver, so we can't complain.
What a fun week of swimming! We'd do it again if we got the chance!
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