Our Trip and a "Few" Pics

Whew. This is me, breathing a sigh of relief that we are back from our SPEEDY trip to Utah. No matter what we did, it was 12 1/2 hours. The kids did well, considering.

We were basically there for the weekend, which was fun AND crazy, but our motivation behind the madness was the baptism of our cute 8 year old nephew, Jaden.

Any amount of time we get to spend with Tucker's side of our family is wonderful. It is much too seldom.

Since I took 200 pics, I'll let the pics tell the story of our weekend.

Here's Jaden - such a cute, fun and energetic boy.

We laughed back when he was born because Maren (his mom) has dark skin and hair....and look how red his hair is! Little did we know there were so many more redheads to come....

The family is growing by leaps and bounds. We certainly can't fit around one single table annymore. Jeannine still manages to provide us all with a "feast"!

He got his wish.....Tucker loves his mom's "multi-colored" cake.

It was also our niece, Mallory's 9th birthday. Lynda Ann is so good at "whipping up" a cool cake.

Games, games, games

Tucker is always "throwing" the kids around (quite literally). This is our nephew Andrew 'floating' in the air.


Cute cousins, Hayley (Lynda Ann's 4th) and our Lexi

More cute cousins! Taylor (Maren's 2nd) and our Jordyn.


Just hangin' out at Maren's

Maren and and Greg's 3rd, Brock, is 2 months older than Peyton. (Their 3rd redhead). Seriously, you would almost think our family was in-bred or something with how many redheads there are! Anyway, these two babies were too cute all weekend.

More of Brock and Peyton. Can you tell they're related?

Gam let the girl's bake their own loaf of bread (which they treated like play dough for about 45 minutes). I didn't sample their extra-kneaded loaves.

The cousins all went to Some Dude's Playground where they have all sorts of blow up slides and stuff. So fun!

Lyndsy (Tucker's youngest sis) and her cute boy River (her first and only so far)

Me and my sis Carly! Carly and Alyson came and visited us, and it was SO great to see them! Look how good she looks! Like 6 weeks post-partum! What?

Cousins (from MY side) Peyton and Alyson

We also got a special visit from Karli and baby Kaiya! It was so fun to see Karli and to meet beautiful Kaiya! My visits with Karli are ALWAYS way too short. I mean, when we were roomates in college...actually waaaay before that when we were in jr high, we had the ability to find endless topics of conversation that were insanely interesting to us both. So, imagine now that we see eachother a few hours per year, it is NEVER enough! But it was such a highlight to get a short visit from Kar. Thanks for doing that Karli!

Lastly, I just have to say I will be glad when Pey masters the stairs. THIS is what I was paranoid of all weekend. It's funny - my girls think stairs are a Utah thing because EVERYONE has them there, and almost no one (we hang out with) has them here.

What a great trip we had with the family!

Oh, and those of you in UT. If you'll be around at Thanksgiving time, email me. We're coming back - for longer that time.