Utah visit

I was able to get out of Dodge this past week and go visit my sister up in Utah. It was a great visit, aside from my naughty children who didn't want to go to sleep at night, and it was fun to see my sister again. She has two kiddos as well and the four of them played fabulously together, plus we got to make caramel corn together, which took me back to my visits with her when I was going to BYU since those visits always involved making something good.
Here are the kiddos as cowboys that were going to save us...

"Team Red" as they called themselves, at the Draper pool...

Practicing their ninja moves...

And one picture for blackmail later in life...

So I am little disturbed that I have no pictures of me and my sister or with any of my friends that I visited. My sister is an amazing person and an ICU nurse and I miss having her around. It never feels quite right at family gatherings since she is up in Utah.

I managed to squeeze in short visits with my good friends Judy in Lehi, Diana in Provo, and Melissa in Cedar City. Judy is an old friend from my Ricks College days and I have total yard envy whenever I visit her house, as well as basement envy (unless you are rich you don't have basements in Vegas, which is really unfortunate when you consider how much cooler that would feel). She always cracks me up whenever we visit. Diana is an old roommate from BYU and I love visiting her and her husband. Mark would crash on their couch when he would come visit me at BYU during our courtship between Provo and Vegas. Melissa and I were in the same major at BYU and she got me my job as a research assistant with Dr Culatta, but I had to leave my sweet job at the Jamba Juice for it. She and I had lost touch after BYU and recently got back in touch via Facebook, and she is just the kind of friend that you can pick up where you left off and feel like no time has past. Well, except for her 3 and my 2 crazy kids running around her house, but other than that no time has past for us!

So it was just what I needed to get out of town and it gave Mark a few good days of studying uninterrupted which was the point of the whole excursion. However, I think he was getting pretty lonely without us. I thought Michael would be so excited to get home and see his Daddy, but he was mad because all he wanted to do was go back to Melissa's house because they had Thomas trains! Speaking of trains, we are back in detox. No more trains for a few weeks. Michael is a little junkie and his behavior just gets worse the more he plays with them. He must think I'm pretty stupid because I keep telling him that I can't find them when he asks for them. He must be thinking "it's pretty easy lady, just find the big yellow box, it's not like they could have sprouted legs". He doesn't say it in so many words, but I see it on his face.