Post Vacation Recovery, School, and Breaking the Curse

After all of our crazy trips in July, we had some recovery we needed to do. Well, SOME of us were ready for recovery. A certain father-of-the-house took off again 48 hours after getting home from Alaska for another fishing trip in the Uinta Mountains. Then he was home for a week and a half and then took ANOTHER fishing trip to Flaming Gorge. So unfair.

 While he was off making out with catching enormous lake trout, I stayed home with the kids in survival mode. Which usually means I don't do much besides work and feed them whatever food is fastest to make with the least amount of dishes. Hooray for chicken nuggets. :) But I got a little more adventurous this time. I guess I'm growing up. Boo.
We had some good times for our last days of summer: we went to the water park with cousins, lost 3 different children at 2 different times at the water park in the dark (we found them all again - no worries), went to the zoo, went out to eat, went to an indoor playground with a bouncehouse and an inflatable slide, did some major organizing/cleaning, and even went to the grocery store a time or two. And once the kiddos were in bed, I had a Twilight movie marathon with my sister-in-law. AWESOME. Well, except the parts where the dog-boy takes his shirt off. Gross. :) We even waited until our men were back in town to watch #4 and #5 because they hadn't seen them yet. We're thoughtful like that. (Jacob has - well had - a standing agreement that he had to watch each Twilight movie with me once. I'm pretty sure he'll never watch them again, but he can't deny he's seen each one at least one time.)
We were all missing Daddy something fierce by the time he got home the second time. Well, the first time too, but it sounded weird to say it like that.

 Being cute at the zoo

 Zebras!

 Komodo dragon!

 Daddy Orang-utan.

 Spider monkeys!

Sleeping at the zoo!

 Petting the goats

 Riding the carosuel

 Playing at the zoo splashpad

 At the Play Factory

 Hazel on the rock wall

 Speed climbing the slide

The day after Jake got back from his last trip, it was Hazel's first day of kindergarten!

I was SOOOOOO not excited about this. I can say that here because she's can't completely read yet so nobody tell her, k? I had all kinds of worries and conflicting emotions about her starting school. Plus several hours worth of rants about public school in general, this specific school, principal, and teacher. However, I'm not gonna go there. Let's just accentuate the positive and say that she's loving it and she's doing really well. The house is a lot quieter during the day now and we all miss her but it's just an adjustment and we'll get used to it. And thank goodness I have almost 2 years before our next first day of kindergarten experience...
On the third day of school, after school, we grabbed Hazel and headed up to Cottonwood, Arizona. Jacob's sister's husband has just been hired in Sedona as a police officer and so they are looking at houses with a more reasonable commute since it's currently 2 hours. :) Cottonwood cuts it down to 20 minutes and doesn't cost a fortune like it does to actually live in Sedona. Anyway, they had found a house that they liked and wanted Jacob to come see it. While Jacob was researching the area, he found there was all sorts of easy fishing just north of the town. Not good eating, but easy to catch. So he decided we should make a family afternoon trip out of it and see if we could get Hazel and Speed to catch their first fishes. I was hoping to also end my 5 year curse of no fish actually caught.

 The fishing was nice and easy and very quickly Hazel caught her first ever fish. She was SO excited. It took Speed a bit longer because he started off exploring and because he kept not reeling in when he needed to. But with a little extra help, he caught his first fish too. It was really, really fun to see their excitement and we're more motivated now to go places where they can fish too.

And after several casts and a couple of lost hot dogs, I ::dundundun:: broke my curse! Small but I'll take it!

(Just for the record, here's a picture of the last fish I caught: August 30, 2008. Not exaggerating. And not kidding - I swear there's a fish mixed in with those plants there.)

So now we're just trying to adjust to a regular grind routine, which is very different for us. We will probably have some more news coming up (starts with "house" and ends with "boat") but that's not 100% concrete yet so we'll wait until it is before we share. :)