We are Family

After a fun-filled visit with Grandma and Grandpa Fife in California, we were off to Utah to visit the Petrucka clan. The kids were very excited to be able to see their cousins. The Petrucka cousins now number 17, and they are all under the age of 13. As you can imagine, they are quite a force when all together. To protect our sanity, we tried something a little different this year and spent more one on one time with the different families of cousins instead of doing so many things with everyone all together. It cut down on the number of kids (and noise) in the house and also gave our kids more time to bond with cousins that they haven't spent as much time with in the past. When we weren't just hanging out, we played laser tag, went to the movies, went fishing, enjoyed the park, took more family pictures than Mark could stand, and ate lots of pizza and Slurpees.

Aunt Page was the very gracious host of several cousin sleepovers, including one which Natalie and Megan dubbed "total drama sleepover" for the amount of crying that went on. Page also introduced us to Ninja Warrior which we watched obsessively. We even took the kids out to the park one day and tried our own version of Ninja Warrior. Emily, Brandon, and Bryce loved creating courses through the play equipment and then timing each other to see who could do it the fastest. (I tried swinging across the monkey bars once and only got past the first one. It seems I have a lot more weight to swing than I used to.)

We did get to do a few things with the whole family. Jim and Christi were brave enough to throw a picnic in their backyard one evening and, on Sunday, everyone gathered with David and Liesl to bless their new baby, Hazel. It was very touching to sit in a Relief Society room filled with our family and see all the uncles and grandpas circling around to bless our newest family member. It was a piece of heaven on earth.

Now we are home and are tying to adjust back to real life. I have been busy washing clothes, and cleaning the toilets which somehow got dirty while we were away, and vacuuming 4 weeks worth of cat hair out of the carpets. We had a great time, but its nice to be home.