Bree- 2 year old pictures

Right after I dropped Miles off to his first day of Kindergarten, I took Bree to get her pictures taken.  It was really nice to just have one sweet kiddo to worry about.  Bree has a little pair of purple flip flops that she loves.  She wears them 24-7.  Yep, she even wants to sleep in them most nights.  As I was thinking about all her cute fancy, frilly dresses to get her pictures in, I just knew there might be a fight about shoes....so I just decided to embrace it and took her pictures in something that would match the shoes.  I think they turned out pretty cute indeed!

That face!  It's just calling out for smooches, don't ya think??

Back to School

Once again it's time to document the Back to School photos.  Tess began 3rd grade on August 20th.  She is in Mrs. Corie Claycomb's class.  This is the first year of school that she is in the same class as her BFF, Mari.  She is SO excited to be in Mari's class; she just adores her.

Love this sassy gal!

Miles had to wait one extra week for Kindergarten to begin.  He started yesterday in Ms. JerylDean Clark's AM class.  He was so excited also!  He said he felt a little nervous, but mostly excited.  He went right in with no problem and began building with blocks.

Here's to a great year!

Lagoon 2013

We went to Lagoon on Friday.  I thought Bree would just love the rides, but actually on her very first ride, the tug boats, she cried and cried the whole time!  I felt terrible and kept wanting them to stop the ride, but the guy just kept it going around and around while she sobbed.  I think she was just scared to sit there alone.  (Bryan had Tess & Miles on "Wicked" at this time and I am, of course, too big to join her.)  Poor baby!

....But, after she was reunited with her big sister and brother for rides, all was well.

I went on the Tidal Wave with Tess & Miles and they were both so cute.  I tried to take a candid picture of their joyful faces.  I couldn't sneakily get one of Tess, but I got this great one of Miles as the boat was at its highest, hands high in the air, giggling and happy.  Love it!

Tess & I rode the Colossus at the end, which I really love.  Bryan snapped this pic and it's great--Tess is so jazzed, on her adrenaline high, and I'm just thinking "I'm getting a little too old for this!"  Once per year is about perfect for me now; I used to be able to go again and again but not anymore!

Alaskan Cruise

Last week, Bryan and I were very fortunate to be invited to tag along on a retreat with Bryan's office.  We went on a cruise to Alaska!  Neither of us have ever been on a cruise before, so this was really exciting for us.  We had a super trip.  Here are the details with LOTS of pictures (warning...lots of "selfies" ahead...)  

Day 1- we flew to Seattle and boarded the ship.  It was huge, as cruise ships tend to be!  We had a room on deck 10, with great views from our balcony.  We spent the first day just wandering around, checking out the boat.  

We had lots and lots of food on this trip.  Room service, 24-hour buffet, and the fancy dining room every night.  Whew!  My favorite thing was being able to try things I probably would never order in a restaurant, either because they were unusual and I wouldn't know if I'd like them, or because they are really expensive.  We had escargot--I've had it before, but Bryan never had; thumbs up.  We had frog legs; thumbs up!  We had caviar; big thumbs down, blech.  We had creme brulee; thumbs up.  We had crab, salmon, and lobster; thumbs up for Bryan, thumbs down for me (I just do not like seafood, even super fresh seafood from Alaska.)  I could go on...but I'm sure this is boring to read.  Suffice it to say, I ate a lot!  (Mostly steak and chicken, and chocolate cake) :)   My favorite thing about the meals was getting to know some of Bryan's co-workers and their spouses better.  We ate with different people each night--there were about 50 of us there--and I loved visiting with them and making new friends.  Here is a picture of us on our first "formal night."  

Day 2- At sea.  Bryan had meetings for work all morning, so I slept in, ordered room service and watched a movie!  Ha!  What a life, I tell ya!  I could get used to that!

Day 3- Ketchikan.  In every port there are lots and lots of  places to shop.  I'm really not much of a shopper at all.  (And of course Bryan, being a typical guy, really dislikes it.)  So we spent very little time shopping.  We mostly tried to explore the town, just by walking around and seeing what there was to see.  In Ketchikan it was all about the salmon!  They were jam-packed in the rivers and it was so much fun to see them swimming upstream.  It looked like such a struggle!  I felt bad for them, trying so hard and just getting pushed right back down.  It's probably hard to see them in the pictures but there were hundreds and hundreds of them.

(Look at the bottom half of this photo to see them better...)

Here's one jumping out of the water.

Our excursion in Ketchikan was snorkeling!  We got great tips for what to do in Alaska from Bryan's sister and bro-in-law, who took a cruise there last year.  When they suggested snorkeling, I immediately thought "Brrrr!"  But we did it and it was really neat.  And, happy news, I was not cold at all.  The wetsuits covered everything but our face, and then the snorkel mask covered basically all of that.  A few inches of our cheeks were all that showed.  We saw sea stars ("starfish" is an incorrect name, apparently), sea urchins, crabs, and sea cucumbers, which were really strange and cool--when they are scared (when you first pick them up) they immediately turn hard and kind of football shaped, but when they calm down they get soft and really long and thin like a snake.  Bizarre!  We also saw a bunch of bull kelp, which is a plant; they said that it grows 5 FEET a day!  Holy cow!

Day 4- Tracy Arm Fjord and Juneau.  They told us to wake up early this day, and we were so glad we did.  At about 6:00 a.m., the ship travelled up the Tracy Arm Fjord which is a beautiful narrow canyon with steep mountains on either side of the boat.  The water is clear and smooth with chunks of icebergs floating all around.  At the top of the fjord is the South Sawyer Glacier.  It was awesome to see the huge glacier, which appears blue.  And I was amazed that our ship could get so near to it, and then turn around in the fjord! (Not a u-turn, but just a 360 degree turn right there!)  The only downside that morning was the cold!  We had jackets, but no big coats.  Thankfully our room had big fluffy warm robes and I layered 2 right over my jacket (I didn't hog all of them, Bryan did get to have one robe for himself).  When Bryan brought them to me, he said, "A cold Michonne is not a happy Michonne."  And, boy, is he right!  He even brought out the duvet and put that on me too.  Nice guy.

We arrived in Juneau around lunchtime.  We explored the city and it was really beautiful too!  It was very hilly, overcast, and a little chilly.  The homes didn't really have yards, but they had beautiful flower gardens surrounding their house.  Who needs a yard when THIS is where your house is built??  Gorgeous!

For our excursion in Juneau, we had planned to go kayaking to Mendenhall Glacier.  Bryan was SO excited to do that!  You are able to kayak right near the glacier and if you're lucky, you can see it "calve"--which is when huge chunks of ice fall off into the lake.  Unfortunately we were not able to do that, but we did enjoy a group excursion with Bryan's co-workers.  We went to the Visitors' Center at Mendenhall Glacier and hiked around to a viewing area of the glacier and a big waterfall.

After that, we got to go whale watching.  The boat was pretty fun, but I'll be honest--the whale watching was pretty lame.  We saw a few, but they were not very close, and we only saw the very tip of their backs.   But we did see some sea lions and 2 big bald eagles, which was neat.

(We did see lots and lots of whales--humpbacks and orcas--from our very own balcony on the ship; they would come pretty far out of the water and we'd see the famous whale tails descend down last.  We also saw a dolphin one day too!  I loved sitting out on the balcony with our binoculars.  It was hard to take pictures because they are pretty fast and we were switching back and forth from binoculars to camera... But here's the dolphin...sorry it's so tiny; it's a screen shot from a video.)

Day 5- Skagway.  This was my very favorite day of the cruise.  We arrived at the port early and went into town.  I loved the little town!  Something about it was just really inviting and quaint.  All the downtown shops have a boardwalk around them, and the town has a super small population so there's very little traffic; everyone just kind of walked in the streets. (The number of full-time residents is only something like 400 people.  In the summer the population goes up to about 8000.)  The townspeople we talked to were super friendly and I just loved it there!  We ran into some LDS missionaries there and visited for a bit.  I asked if they had been there for a winter yet and they had....the coldest it got is -60 degrees.  Did you catch that??  MINUS 60 DEGREES!!!!  Aaagh!  I cannot even imagine!  They said they would drive from house to house, leaving the car running the whole time, go up and knock on the door, and then head back to the warm car in between.  

We took a hike up to a lake called Dewey Lake.  It was beautiful; not very big, but it had the smoothest water I've ever seen.  Bryan was skipping a bunch of rocks, but the ripples would just vanish almost instantly and it would get glassy again.  It was really neat to see.  The trees are so big in the forests of Alaska.  Utah is a beautiful place and there are lovely things to see here, but man, Alaska is really a world apart from any wilderness Utah has to offer.

After our hike, it was time to catch the bus for our Skagway excursion:  zip-lining!  I've never done any long or high ziplines, so this was super fun for me.  All the guides were your typical rock climber dudes...young, adrenaline-seeking guys who needed a haircut and a shower! :)  But they were so nice and a lot of fun, joking with everyone.  There were 11 of us in our group, including a dad with his two teenage kids, a boy and a girl.  The boy (16 years old) was deathly afraid of heights.  At the first zipline (which was small and very slow) we had to sit and wait....and cheer on....and encourage....and eventually kind of yell at....this boy to go!  He stood up on the platform for probably about 10 minutes, not daring to walk off.  (10 minutes may not seem like a long time, but when everyone is waiting for one last person, it seemed very long.  Luckily his dad made sure to go behind him on every other zip, in case that happened again he could just push him!  Ha!)

After the ziplining, we still had some time in Skagway, so we found another little hike/walk out to Yukutania Point, which is a rocky area where we watched another big humpback whale.  So cool!

(After our very busy day, we were exhausted!  Typically during our cruise we took the stairs all over the ship to help work off all that cruise food!  The boat had 15 decks total; the dining room was on 3, most activities were on 4 or 5, and our room was on 10, so we did lots of stairs every day.  But on this evening we just couldn't face it and even Bryan, the Energizer Bunny himself, asked to take the elevator.)

Day 6- At Sea.  More meetings for Bryan, more laziness (love it!) for me, and another formal night.  This night had the best show of the whole cruise.  It was kind of similar to a Cirque du Soleil production with aerialists, acrobats, and the like.  

Day 7- Victoria, British Columbia.  My first time ever in Canada!  We arrived in the evening and only had a few hours, so we didn't schedule an excursion and just did the walk-around-and-explore-the-city thing.  We walked to a park in town called Beacon Hill Park and it was easily the most beautiful park I've ever seen!  (If there is one word I noticed I keep typing over and over, it's "beautiful.")  This park had stunning flowers everywhere, and a whole bunch of plants and flowers that I have never seen before.  Some really cool, unusual things.  I'm not a horticulturist, nor am I a photographer with a very fancy camera, so these pictures don't do it justice, but believe me when I say it was ...wait for it....beautiful!  (Apparently I'm not much of a writer either...where's my thesaurus?)

(So many lily pads on this pond, I thought you could go walk right out on them and not sink...)

(Huge hydrangeas in every color...)

(Those brown leafy plants were taller than us.)

(These looked kind of like roses, but were very near to the ground, like begonias.  Pretty!)

This pine tree was unreal...It looked like the burned skeletal remains of a pine tree, although it was very green.  When we got closer to take another look, the pine needles were unlike anything I've seen...

Each branch and the entire trunk of the tree looked like this:  (And yes, they were very pokey!)

(This plant is apparently where we get "Mike & Ike" candy from...)

One last thing I have to mention is a show on the ship that we loved.  It was called the Hot Glass Show and they usually had two each day for a few hours each.  We watched about 3 shows and never got bored!  Three glass blowers from the Corning Museum of Glass would just work and make different pieces of glass while we watched and asked questions.  It was awesome!  They gather up some molten glass on their metal rod, adding color, and of course always rotating it so the glass won't drip off, and then they shape it into amazing things:  bowls, vases, goblets, sculpture, you name it!  It was really fascinating.  Here is a picture of a vase that is just about complete:

And these are a few more of the pieces they made just on this cruise alone.  They raffled off several pieces of glass to the audience (which we sadly did not win) and they also auctioned off a few pieces at the end of the cruise to benefit breast cancer research.  

Day 8-  Back to Seattle and then back to SLC.  We had such a great time on this cruise!  I loved being able to be away with just Bryan for 8 days.  I saw some spectacular scenery and met some great people.  I cannot end this post without thanking our wonderful parents (and my 2 sweet nieces) who took care of our children while we were gone.  Even though I missed the kids, I knew they were in such good hands all week!  Thanks again!!!