A Vacation To End All Vacations. Literally.

Seeing as how I "have some time to spare" right now, I thought I would do a little vacation post.

We didn't actually go anywhere for vacation, our vacation came to us. In the form of Steve's brother Mike and his wife Sheila and their 3 kids, Spencer, Asher and Reagan. We have been looking forward to and anticipating their visit for months now. The week before they came, Steve and I worked our little behineys off. Well, I guess I should say his little one and my..not..so..little..one. Anyway, we worked hard to get everything done and taken care of so that we could just relax, have fun, and enjoy our visit with them. The guest room they are staying in was our 'throw everything we don't want to look at or deal' room. It had all the boxes we had yet to unpack in it. It was the kind of stuff that I had put off packing when we moved because I didn't want to have to sort through it, so the last day of moving I was just throwing it all in boxes. That kind of stuff. Very tedious to go through. And this is another long story so just suffice it to say, that I had to clean out our storage room and the room under the stairs to be able to unpack that room. Getting that done, buying food, doing laundry, paying bills, getting my hair cut an colored so I didn't look nasty in all our pictures, it wore me out. But I kept thinking, "It will be worth it when they are here and we don't have to worry about any of that and we can just have fun".


They flew in late Wednesday night. That day, Addison started running a fever, then Zac started getting a little sick. The next morning, all our kids were all sick and running fevers and having headaches. Not my idea of fun vacation type stuff. We got all dosed up on Ibuprofen and went to the open house for the Oquirrh Mountain Temple. It was very nice, but by the end of the tour, my kids could not hold themselves up. We decided to take them home and put them to bed. Mike and Sheila were going to go get lunch, do a little shopping and then come home and we would watch a movie. On the ride home my head started to hurt so bad, I thought I was gonna die. So we all went home and went to bed. As Mike and Sheila were preparing to leave the temple, they received some pretty bad news that kinda put a downer on things, so they came straight home.

The next day I was giving us all quite regular doses of pain reliever/fever reducers. We were feeling well enough to load up the ATV's and some lunch and head for the mountains.

We took turns riding ATV's and playing at our little camp site.

I'm really surprised no one was seriously injured when the boys brought out the sticks and starting doing boy things with them.

The next day was the celebration of the birth of our nation. After eating red, white and blue pancakes ('cause that's just what you do on the 4th of July) we went to a parade. Everyone was feeling much better, except the kids had a cough still.

After the parade we went to my mom's house for lunch and some sleep.

Later that night Addy started running a fever again (no one had a fever all day) and her cough got really bad. So I took her to a 24 hour pediatric doctor. That's where we got the fabulous news. Addy has SWINE FLU and that is probably what the rest of us had/have too.

We stayed home from church the next day. I figured we had infected our fair share of the population already. That morning Sheila got an e-mail saying that her neighbors house had burned down and they lost everything. Just one more thing to add to the fun. Yesterday was a fun day. Let me tell ya. I think we all reached our breaking point. We were worried that by the time we were better, Mike and Sheila would be sick and our whole trip would be ruined. But, we decided to look on the bright side of everything and try and have as much fun as possible for the remaining vacation.

That included going camping today. We put a deposit down on a "Toy Hauler" a few weeks ago. We were going to use my mom's pop up trailer to sleep in and we were going to load the ATV's in the Toy Hauler and Mike and Sheila were going to sleep in that. We were supposed to be able to pick it up last night so we could have it loaded and ready to go first thing this morning. The guy e-mailed me last week and said there was a problem with the scheduling and we would not be able to have it until this morning. We figured that was OK, we would be all ready to go when it became available. Well, it is now 3:30 in the afternoon, and the person who had it over the weekend has yet to bring it back.

We sat around waiting. The guy we were renting it from wouldn't answer my calls. More and more time passed. I was getting really mad because we are only going to be gone 2 nights and we wanted to have all day today to be there. The guy finally called me and said they person who has it now isn't answering his calls. Mike and Sheila went ahead and left so that our camp sites aren't given away. I'm not really mad anymore. Today is already over. By the time we get the trailer and get to where we are going, it will be night, so I guess it doesn't matter what time tonight it is. So we are just sitting here waiting.

In trying to stay positive around here, we keep reminding ourselves that everything happens for a reason. Hopefully in a few days, I will be posting some very lovely camping pictures...