Thursday, February 09, 2017

A dream years in the making


We've been waiting a long time for this day to come, for Jason I think this dream hatched the moment we tied the knot. He's always dreamed of being a snowboarding family and for the first time we were all on the mountain on boards together and it was epic. After Saturday games and dance we started our Flagstaff weekend off with In-n-Out and "would you rather" conversation starters, which seems to be a bit of a tradition these days. Followed by cannon balls in the hotel pool, a makeshift hot tub in the bathtub and the Discovery Channel before finally rolling into bed just before midnight. 




The next day the boys didn't sleep in as long as I was hoping for and the cartoons weren't keeping them as quiet as I was hoping for, instead they jumped from bed to bed, wrestled and made shadow puppets before we took the circus act to the continental breakfast.



Since it was Sunday we found a church to go to, Kylie, Maddox and Ryder even got up and bore their testimonies (If I promised them an extra sucker from the hotel lobby). Afterwards we decided to explore some Indian ruins that we visited years ago, which ended up being one visit too many. The kids weren't really thrilled to be spending their day roaming through historic land when the Superbowl and snapchat stories were awaiting. Well, the younger boys were excited about it until they found out they couldn't bring home all the treasured rocks they found. It also didn't help that they got yelled at by a cranky pants park ranger for stepping off the paths, but we did have fun laughing at Jason for mistaking every stone on the ruins to be pottery and we gave a stern chuckle when Kylie took creative license on the message board writing "a waste of time" next to someone's thoughtful comment "A step back in time" (which we promptly made her cross out). We gave her a hard time about being grumpy, but all in all it ended up being a pleasant day, although I don't think they'll be asking to go back any time soon.





They wanted pictures with the rocks they had to leave behind. Here are two of the twenty five.







The many moods of a teenage girl....





The natural blow hole was pretty cool and the cranky pants ranger warmed up to us a little more as she told us all about it.






That's better...


After an early bedtime for the boys (and a late night of studying in the lobby for Jason and Kylie) we were geared up and ready for a fun and freezing day on the slopes. Ryder has been so excited to go, we put our bets that he would last a few hours tops then call it quits, but when it came time to leave around 3:00 that afternoon he was begging to stay longer. Jason spent the morning teaching him and he picked it up pretty quick. He schooled the ski school kids twice his age on the bunny slopes and graduated to the lift before the day was over. The other kids were so excited to go too, Maddox is working on toe edge and is convinced he's ready for black diamonds and I'm pretty sure Kylie and Jayden are faster than me now. It was just a fun and memorable day, looking forward to many more like it in the future! But did I mention it was freezing?! Still waiting to get all the feeling back in my thumb. No joke. But seriously, how cute is this?? I could just eat him.

ski