Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Flagstaff, Oct 2012

 Marty and I love Flagstaff.  Every time we drive through there to Utah we wish we could hang out and experience more, but it's either on the front end or back end of the trip where we want to "make time."  Well, I HAVE to get out of AZ every October and this year we met up with my parents there.  It was so wonderful.  Just a skiff of snow, nice and cool, smelled like pine.

We got to make good use of our National Parks Pass which is an on-going goal of ours.  I hate that I waited so long to post this that I can hardly even remember any details.  Plus, I was near the end of my yucky first trimester, so that's always a blur to me.  Let's see, we saw Sunset Crater...





 (Here I am trying to hide my "is she or isn't she" belly.  I guess when you are pregnant twice in one year with your FOURTH, you pop out pretty fast!)





 Wapatki National Monument...



 (Brynn doing all her activities to become a "junior ranger")
 The trains in Downtown Flagstaff...

 (Bryce naming each and every part of the train)

We also climbed around in the (Lava Tube?) Caves.  Marty and I took a late night date to the observatory (where Pluto was discovered) and thought it was going to be cute and romantic to star gaze in a dark-sky-city like Flagstaff.  It started out that way, but the lines were insane so we ended up freezing our fingers and toes off outside in a two-hour wait to see a globular cluster.  We had a lot of fun at the hotel.  There was a pool that was way too cold for me, but a cave-like hot tub that wasn't too hot for the kids.  We had to continually build forts on the big bed to keep Gabe contained rather than crawling around on a nasty hotel floor.  There didn't seem to be any shortage of people to hold the sweet thing, either.  There was an abundance of apple pie brought from my mom that never seemed to run out, and with the kitchenette in the hotel we only had to eat out once the whole few days (Five Guys - it was so fun).  The baby, who has almost never been up in the middle of the night since he was just a couple months old, chose this time to be picky and was up pretty much all night every night. 
Hotels + kids = FUN! 
Hotels + babies = OUCH. 
Hotel + babies + grandparents = FUN with much less ouch. :)

Monday, January 28, 2013

A family of five...for now....



Meh, I get sick of explanations about blogging absences so...moving on.  Since Gabe's last haircut we have seen the weather cool off, Flagstaff, Thanksgiving, Christmas, a six year old, many new baby teeth and a wiggly tooth, not to mention a first and second trimester to Johnson Baby #4 - a GIRL!!  There is more to come...