One reason to live in the mountains

I was just reading a blog about a beetle and thought I'd mention the HUGE FREAKING beetle that climbed on my back while in the pool in Orlando.
I felt something on my back, thought it was my swimsuit ties, and ignored it... but then I felt it move... and looked on my shoulder to see this.



No kidding, the thing was a good two inches long, not counting the huge pinchers off its front end. It would help if there was a hand in the photo so you could see how big these things get. If I hadn't been standing in the swimming pool I would have tried to capture it for science, but I was feeling a little vulnerable. I brushed it off my back without screaming (my superhero training took over) and it started swimming toward Thing 2. I warned her off, she scooted out of its reach and it turned back to me. It started swimming toward me, or whoever else was closest. It was totally creepy.

It finally gave up and swam into the drain ledge around the pool. I got the attention of a pool guy who came with a net. But he couldn't get the net into the ledge to get at the bug. I had to scoop it out from the drain ledge using my bare hand and my superhero skills, which are what kept me from fleeing to the other side of the pool bellowing in horror. The pool guy caught it with his net. I might add he never got closer than the other end of a five foot pole from the thing.

I googled "giant water insect Florida probiscus" and found that it is called a giant water bug. They don't have these kinda things where I live.

Dolphin, not Swan

We're back! And we had a great time!

Hubby was there for the Agile 2010 conference, not that it matters for my part of the story, but the conference went well for him.

First of all, turns out we were at the Disney Dolphin, not the Swan. While we're talking about this let me state that The Dolphin is not really a dolphin. It has spikes and scales and is rather un-dolphin like. Hubby thought it's more like a sturgeon.


I was told it is a Dolphin Fish, as opposed to a Dolphin. Though a Dolphin Fish has a big fin up its back... Okay it doesn't look like either a dolphin or a sturgeon but when you say Dolphin, you don't think of that freaky big headed thing, you think of Flipper. A mammal. Smooth, squeaky clean, jumping ahead of the spray from a ship.

I think the Disney Swan and Sturgeon kind of has a nice ring to it, and certainly fits their motif better. Anyway, the Swan and Sturgeon (aka Dolphin) hotels are practically twin hotels separated by a lake and a walkway. They sort of share 5 swimming pools. The difference is at the Dolphin we were closer to the interesting pools. The pool next to the Swan is a big square pool - the one I put in my last post. The Dolphin had one of those, then a large 3 foot deep kid pool, then a volleyball pool, the waterfall pool (also pictured in my previous post) with a slide going into it, and another little pool on the other side. They're all connected by sidewalks, but the elevators right outside our room dropped us down to right by the kid pool and waterfall pool we were interested in, and it all worked beautifully.

Hubby got us a room upgrade, so we had a great big room. Sort of. The hotel room layout left us scratching our heads - so much space that could have been utilized so much more effectively. There was a big wide hallway down the side of the room... just a weird layout but it was bigger than the usual hotel room. The 2nd bed was a small uncomfortable fold-out couch which the two girls shared the first night. Since Thing 2 is a kicker and sleeps really hot and Thing 1 is always freezing, (and there was a perfect nook for it in that big room) we got a roll away bed in the corner the next night. The girls were enchanted with that and they swapped who got to sleep on the roll-away for the rest of our stay.

Hubby knows so many more people at these conferences than he knows in our home town so this was a real social event for him. Standing in line to check in or go to a restaurant or get on the bus and he has people saying hello and talking shop. I'd send him for a yogurt and not seem him for an hour. There's lots of networking with other computer conference buddies. He did blow off quite a bit of the conference to be with us, though.

A guy named David who Hubby works with sometimes has a 7 1/2 year old we'll call Thing A. David was coming to the conference and his wife is out of the country so he contacted us a couple weeks before to see if I would watch his munchkin at the conference while he was busy doing conference stuff. So my girls had someone to play with.

All six of us spent the day on Sunday at Magic Kingdom. My girls are old hands at Disney and were very excited to just fast pass Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain, which in DisneyWorld are very conveniently located right next to each other. Thing A and her dad have never really been to a Disney park before, and she wasn't sure about some of the rides. So we split up by families and Hubby and I took our little Disney veterans on everything we could fast pass. It was all in all a good day at the Magic Kingdom.

The other big Disney day was Tuesday. In evaluating our past DisneyWorld experience we had seen that there were just a few things at the three other parks besides Magic Kingdom that really held the girls' interest. So we figured maybe we could get a park hopper and do all three of the other parks in one day. Thing A came with us while her daddy stayed at the conference. We hit the Animal Adventure to do the Safari Ride, which last time we were there was amazing, this time there weren't too many animals around.

Thing 2 had been looking forward to having her face painted.

Thing A and Thing 2 with their face paint.

We saw quite a few animals, the most memorable was this mother and baby gorilla.

We were at Animal Adventure park for 3-4 hours, then hopped a bus to the Hollywood Studios park. The only thing there for the girls, really, was the Honey I Shrunk The Kids playground and a Toy Story ride. The girls all thought the playground was great, and we let them run around there for an hour. I stayed at the playground while Hubby walked over to fast pass the Toy Story ride, and found that they weren't Fast Passing, and the line wait was an hour and a half the first time he checked, and between an hour and two hours the subsequent times he checked. No Thanks. We gathered up the kids and took them to Epcot.

The Honey I Shrunk The Kids Playground



I hadn't given Epcot enough credit. We could have spent a lot more time there. Last time it seemed that Epcot was just about food and shopping from different countries, and we spent the whole time looking for the two or three rides that are there. But this time we went through Spaceship Earth, and didn't have time for all the other things to see in the front circle, before you even get back to the countries. As expected, we ran out of time. The girls wanted to shop in Japan for Pokemon stuff, and we promised them dinner in Mexico. We hit it all kind of quick, and didn't even get over to the Aquarium part, which we've seen before and is very neat. We ended up meeting David back at the hotel at 10:30 at night or so. 3 parks with 3 little girls in 12 hours. As we rode the bus back to the hotel Thing 2 told me, "Today's been a LARGE day."

At Epcot they give the kids a paper mask on a stick that they can color. At every country there is someone from that country at a desk who will stamp the kids' masks and put a hang tag on it representing their country. The kids think this is really cool.


The girls liked Japan.

The other days we mostly spent at the pool, or letting the girls play at the hotel room. They like to get me out of their hair when they're doing their pretend play, but with me there in the room with them they were a little inhibited.
I took the girls to a restaurant that had the kids menus on viewmasters. What a clever idea!

The last night we were there David and Thing A were going to a restaurant over in the Swan where they have Disney characters come around to the tables to say hello. We joined them and saw Pluto and Goofy. The girls were tickled pink.

We were scheduled to come home Saturday evening, tonight. However, on Thursday night as we were assessing what to do with our last day we looked at reviews for Universal Studios and saw that apparently the whole world is visiting Universal Studios to see Harry Potterville. There were reports of 2 hour lines for rides, and huge lines just to get into the shops. Since we hate lines so bad, and based on our experience with Disney's Hollywood Studios that there are more shows there than rides, we decided we'll wait until the kids are a little older to do that. We could have done a Cirque du Soleil show at Downtown Disney on Friday night. David and Thing A saw one and said it was wonderful. Then Hubby told me he was leaving home on a 6:00 a.m. flight Sunday morning, and had a boatload of stuff to do to get ready for that. So instead of getting home at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday and having him pull another all-nighter on Saturday, we decided to end our fun a day early. After Hubby went to the closing keynote speech on Friday morning he called Delta and found they could get us on a plane that evening.

The girls were very disappointed to hear they wouldn't have another day at the hotel pool, but we placated them with a couple hours at the pool with Daddy while I stayed in the room and packed us up. We were out by 2:00 p.m., which meant we didn't have to pay for the hotel that night, and we caught our plane to make it back last night.

Did I mention the rainstorms every afternoon while we were in Orlando? Anything from a good sprinkle to a real gullywasher would hit at least once each day, if not two or three times a day while we were there. As we were boarding the plane they said there was a micro storm burst coming in and if we didn't get out ahead of it we'd be stuck there for a while. Apparently we made it out just in time, and landed early back home. We quickly got in and unloaded the car, fed the last two living crickets to the gecko (who did just fine and is still fat tailed and happy), and got the kids in their pajamas. As we were brushing the girls' teeth the doorbell rang and who should be standing on our doorstep but my sister, with Kelso and her dogs. She and her darling husband drove the hour and 45 minutes down to drop off the dog, then they hugged everyone and turned around to drive an hour and 45 minutes back to their house. That's a three and a half hour drive for them, just because they're sweet, completely saving us a trip to go get him. Above and beyond!

Hubby started printing last night and has had the printer going most of the morning today. I doubt if he would have gotten much sleep at all if we hadn't have come home a day early. I'm sad to have missed a day of playing, but all in all this was better. The girls are upstairs happily pretending in their room, the dog is asleep at my feet, I can blog and run some laundry, and the gecko will have dinner today. Hubby can help me move the old TV out of the new Toy Room in preparation for the friends from out of town who will get here at the end of the week, in addition to getting ready for his next trip. It's good to be home.

Orlando Bound

We leave for Florida in the morning. Hubby has a conference in Orlando and when he first suggested the girls and I come too I told him no thanks, we've done DisneyWorld twice already (for someone who lives a 5 hour plane ride away and has 7 and 8 year old kids that's saying a lot, I think), and sure, DisneyWorld is fine, but for the age of our kids I kind of prefer DisneyLand... and we've been-there-done-that more than a lot of people who live in California, I think. Save up those frequent flier miles for something cool. (Wow, how blase am I?) Then he told me the conference is at the Disney Swan. What?? (We don't stay at the Swan. Too pricey for us little po' folks.) And of course the conference pays for the hotel room. WHAT? So instead of trying to keep the kids from tearing apart a swanky hotel room or watching them paddle in the gorgeous empty pristine boring pool miles from anything but the nearest golf course and $8.00 bagel I get to lounge by a DISNEY pool with slides and waterfalls and a Disney park or Downtown Disney only a bus ride away? Well, that's completely different!

Tomorrow this will be us!!!

Uh oh... that looks like a plain boring square conference hotel pool to me. We'll have to see if there's not something more interesting around somewhere. We stayed at the Port Orleans before and that pool doesn't look much better from the internet, but it had a section of slides and squirty things for the kiddies off to the right out of the picture, I think.
Oh, here is what we saw, there are slides and waterfalls off behind this thing in the Port Orleans pool.


A second search found a more fun looking picture of the Swan pool. It looks like there is at least a waterfall somewhere, obviously there's more than one pool. And the Swan pool comes with that fun person to throw my kids into the air. Oh, yes, this will work!

The other time we stayed at a DisneyWorld property hotel we moved from the boring conference hotel to the Disney hotel just long enough to go to the parks, then we flew home. We didn't plan time in at Disney to just swim, we bought a four day pass, went to the parks every day, and it was always too late at the end of the day to let the kids play in the Disney pool. We just walked by it, listening to the other children having fun. My kids had to go to the PARKS. I am the mean mommy who dragged her crying little girls past the pool, as they stretched their little hands out to it, "But MOMMY! We want to SWIM! We want to play in the water! We wa-"
"NO! NO! We have TICKETS! You will GO to the PARK and you will RIDE the RIDES and you will BE HAPPY ABOUT IT!!!" That was me before. But this time, this time we may go to a park or two in between pool days, if we feel like it, but we have at least three days, maybe more, while daddy is conferencing. That's three or four full days we will be those folks sitting by the pool. Or I will be, anyway, while the kids swim. I think I better throw an extra novel into my suitcase. And another bottle of waterproof sunscreen. And a hat.

The dog will be staying at my fabulous sister's Dog Resort, playing with his doggy cousins for the week we're gone. I lost my good pre-trip packing days by driving him up to my sister's on Wednesday and stayed over Thursday to do some stuff at my mom's, then got back really late on Thursday and packed today. Today I washed every stitch of dirty clothing in the house, took the kids to their final swimming lesson, ran to the grocery store, and DID NOT get the battery replaced in either of my water proof watches, which torques my hide. Wah.

Hubby got home about 9:00 tonight from 4 days in New Jersey. We're almost completely packed and I've got to go to bed, there are just those nagging little things that I know I've forgotten... The plane leaves at 10:00 tomorrow morning so I won't have much time to figure it out. Hubby's probably going to pull an all-nighter getting ready for the conference... there just aren't enough hours in the day to be him. I keep thinking of that old movie where Michael Keaton cloned himself...

Seven

We celebrated Thing 2's 7th birthday. It's killing me how fast my babies are growing up. I see them walking around and am floored at their long lankiness... They're almost as tall as I am. When I'm on my knees.

In Utah Thing 2's birthday falls on a state holiday. There is a parade, and fireworks. Since my brother's office window overlooks the parade route, instead of camping out the night before, or even racing down early to squat a place from which to see the parade, we just pull into his parking lot in a leisurely fashion 20 minutes after the parade starts, call him to buzz us up, and then go join him and his family (and my folks) to sit in air conditioned comfort on the large window ledge of his 2nd floor office. We look out over the heads of the people who have been camped there since last night, and watch the parade turn right in front of us. There are Banbury Cross donuts (thank you, Hubby!) cold milk, bathrooms, and a coke machine right down the hall. What more could you want? So we started Thing 2's birthday by going to the parade.

Thing 2 said she wanted Tortellini for her birthday meal. So after the parade we met back at our house for an italian inspired lunch. It was very nice.

There was more stress than normal for me leading up to her birthday because I had spent the two previous days swapping two rooms in our house. There are a couple of reasons for doing this, one is that I want to put a murphy bed in the larger of the two rooms, and can't do it the way it is now. By swapping the rooms I will gain a guest room of sorts and give the girls more room to play with their toys. The larger room that used to be the TV room has now become the toy room, and that's where the murphy bed will go. The smaller room used to be the kids' toy room, where the most of their toys were kept and where they had to play with them. The problem was that once the walls were lined with a couple shelves of toys, the play kitchen, a couple of doll strollers (because you can't get rid of the single stroller just because you get a double!), and an easel, there was no where to play. They often overflowed into what WAS the TV room. I finally figured this out, and swapped the rooms. My motivation for doing it THE DAYS before the birthday party was that as part of the room swap we will be trading out our old 347 pound tube television, and the huge wardrobe-like shelf that it sits in, for a sleek new flat screen TV, and a low profile slim TV cabinet for it to sit on. The previous weekend it worked out that we went to Costco and bought the new TV. In order to get the TV box out of my kitchen for the birthday party I had to give it somewhere to go, which meant I had to buy the cabinet (found a solid wood one I liked on the cheap that wasn't from IKEA but I did have to assemble it myself) and get everything put together before I had the party. Did I also mention that instead of hiring the fabulous independent baker lady that I usually have make our birthday cakes, I'd decided to do it myself?

By 10:30 pm the night before the party I had baked the cake, and pretty much moved the two rooms (except for the behemoth old TV and cabinet, which are much too heavy for one person to move and are still sitting in what is now the toy room where the murphy bed will go someday), but the new TV was still sitting in its box in my breakfast nook and I hadn't assembled the TV cabinet. I opened the box, pulled out the instructions, looked over the dozens of pieces of wood in the box... and immediately gave up on that. Which is not like me, I like assembling that sort of thing. But No Way was I going to get that put together... I still had to create a dolphin out of cake before I could go to bed. And not just a picture of a dolphin painted on the cake with frosting, she had requested the dolphin be MADE out of the cake. I was tired, frustrated, and quite overwhelmed.

About an hour later, pushing midnight, as I was putting the finishing touches on the cake, Hubby came home from a week in ... Oh, who knows where. And in true White Knight fashion, he set to assembling the TV cabinet while I cleaned up the kitchen and pulled the TV out of the box. By about 3:00 a.m. I was exhausted, the cabinet was assembled, the TV was up, and the new Blue Ray player was connected. I went to bed. Hubby stayed up and connected the Wii.
Here is the finished cake. Remember I started with a plain ol' 9x13 cake. It wasn't quite how I envisioned it, but I was running out of room on the back of the cookie sheet that I had put it on, so the water part is one piece of cake kind of angled up on the other, so the one end is higher than the rest. I thought it worked pretty well.


So the fact that we made it to the parade only 20 minutes late, and Thing 2's birthday was a great success, was kind of surprising given how little sleep Hubby and I had had the night before. But everything came together. Thing 2 LOVED the cake, and was more thrilled than words can say that she got the thing she most wanted, a Pillow Pet... even if it was the horse, which last week she had crossed off the list of desirable Pillow Pets she'd given me two weeks before.

Jackson

We had a fabulous time in Jackson. I've had a few days to get my ducks back in a row, but that hasn't helped. I still have piles of laundry, and just put away the suitcases yesterday.

My family has taken an annual trip to Jackson for a number of years now, but this year was bigger and better because we were also celebrating my folks' 50th wedding anniversary. Wahoo! And we couldn't have asked for a better trip. Everything just worked out swimmingly. I'll let the pictures do the talking, mostly.

We went for a hike and the kids did really well. We took a wrong turn and got lost, which ended up being a significant shortcut, saw an adolescent bear (no mother in sight).
Hubby and Thing 2 at Phelp's Lake

At these family outings my daughters are inseparable from their favorite cousin, who is right in between them in age. She's the tallest one on the right.
My folks, whose 50th is next month

We also had a cannon ball contest in the pool (I was a judge, not a participant). This is the line of judges, I'm in the middle. Thing 2 is an excellent cannonballer, by the way, and won her division, but didn't have the mass to take the overall prize.


Hubby and Thing 2

We ALL (including my folks) took a whitewater river raft ride, had a pictures taken by an old-time photographer place, and rented canoes for a day on String lake.

My dad used to be a river guide, he spent several summers in the 50s and 60s guiding inflatable boats down the rivers of southern Utah, and is very handy with a canoe. He took my mom on a little ride.

My sister-in-law and I took the 3 musketeers out for a ride.

We stumbled on a family of ducks. Mohawk ducks. A mom and seven babies. It was fascinating, we floated along with them for a while. The girls were thrilled.


The three girls just like to hang out together, no canoes required. They just played in the water.

Ain't she cute?


Hubby and I took Thing 1 for a ride. You may ask why I'm always in the back of the canoe. When there's cold water and my camera involved, my inner control freak emerges.

Thing 2 wanted to go swimming. You can almost hear her say through her chattering teeth, "Can I stop smiling for the camera and get back in the boat already?"



We also rented two kayaks, but I didn't find them as easy to maneuver.


Hubby and I took a kayak out once, though, and there was a sort of canoe rendezvous, with the two canoes with my brother and sister and spouses and some of the kids all out on the lake


We had a great trip. My niece said "Can we do all this again next year?" We'll come to Jackson again, but some of the extra activities were special for the 50th anniversary. "When is the next 50th?" You've got about 28 years to go.

Somewhere between Soda Springs and Tin Cup

Each year my folks rent a big ol' four bedroom condo in Teton Village and take their three kids, of which I am one, and our families up there for five days. It is more fabulous than I can describe. They've been doing it for years. We've even had the same condo every year, until this year, when we got the one next door. It's even more fashionably furnished. But I digress.

This year on his way up to Jackson in their suburban, my brother hit a cow. The first we heard about it was an hour ago when my oldest niece texted a rather brief announcement. Something like "... we just hit a cow." Hearing this freaked out my mother, who is a professional worrier anyway. Despite it being past her bedtime, she can't make herself go to bed. She is knitting furiously, occasionally asking those of us with phones if we've heard anything. My niece finally responded that everything was okay and they were back on the road.

- I came back to finish the story - They got in sometime after midnight, but gave the full story the next morning. Everyone is okay, the suburban is okay, and they actually hit two cows, who both ran away. My SIL, who knows cows, assured us one will probably die, if not both. She says they hit them pretty hard, probably broke one's hip, and gave the other one a really nasty headache. There were lots of jokes, of course, about "Are we having steak tonight?"

The story that emerged the next morning was that the cows were laying in an alternating pattern on the road, creating a slalom course of sorts. My SIL saw the cow first, yelled "DEER!" about the time my brother saw it.(She's used to driving in the canyon.) The black hide of the cows blended in perfectly with the dark night. My brother swerved to avoid the first cow, and would have just bounced into the ditch except for the 2nd cow that loomed up in their headlight. (They had just found out at the previous stop that they only had one.) No one painted me a picture, but from my understanding they ended up going between the cows, sort of bumping both of them, instead of T-Boning (ha ha) one or the other. The braking, swerving, bumping, and the cascade of luggage from the back of the suburban woke up their four daughters and added the element of wildly screaming girls to the excitement.



Those black cows are mean, how they lay in wait on the road for you like that... Just look at her... She's challenging you to a duel with her eyes.


Hubby suggested they get a couple of little vinyl cow silhouettes to put on the side of the suburban. My sister tells me that one more and they qualify as cow aces.

More good things

Kelly Darling posted a wonderful list of some of her favorite things. A couple got me teary. She's fabulous at looking for the wonderful. Sometimes I don't do that so well. But she inspired me to give it a shot today. So here are some of the things that grease the wheels as my world goes 'round.


* My daughters' tousled hair, soft cheeks, and stillness when they're sleeping.

* The bell on the front doorknob janging late at night when Hubby lets himself in after a long trip.

* How the dog comes to the top of the cellar steps to wait for me whenever I go down to the cellar. He doesn't do stairs, but he does wait at the top.

* How Thing 1 gets so excited to write a note (and hopefully get a response) from any magical person such as Santa, a Leprechaun, and at this moment (as she prepares to put the tooth that came out this morning under her pillow) the Tooth Fairy.

* The notes that Hubby leaves on my pillow sometimes on his way out of town.

* Sitting on the front step in the evening and watching my neighborhood get ready for the night.

* The fact that when we're both sitting down on the front step I can look the dog right in the eye.

* Watching my daughters during their swim lesson - Thing 1's freestyle no longer resembles swimming underwater with the periodic heads-up-dog-paddle to breathe, her arms actually break the surface. Thing 2's is very splashy with her little arms slapping the water at each stroke.

* When Hubby cooks. Anything he cooks.