Europe trip research

Researching countries together

Abe and I have very different philosophies and approaches to travel. In addition to navigating our faith journey, we are enjoying the bonus of exciting conversations around negotiating these differences too. Woohoo!

All joking aside, working things out with Abe, while hard for both of us when we have strong feelings on a subject, is its own type of joy. He is wise, rational, level-headed, a great listener, introspective, self-aware, and unfailingly kind. And when he’s talking,half the time I am wondering why I feel any differently because he articulates himself so persuasively and well.

Abe values routine and comfort more than going new spiritual, mental, or physical spaces. He functions better when he is operating within his usual rhythm, and we feel equally invested in his health–so giving space for his routines is something we both want. And his reference point for international travel is that he never did it until college, and when he did take a Europe trip with his friends it was extremely uncomfortable for him. He felt guilty about spending the money and out of his comfort zone encountering new cultures and people and places. So for him, international travel is uncomfortable–and for our kids, mostly unnecessary.

My reference point is pretty different because my family spent two months every summer traveling, and every other year we spent those months abroad. My dad also spent a semester teaching in Italy, so I did preschool there–and my parents put a lot of energy into camping with their very young children all around Europe. Although I don’t remember much from those earliest trips, travel always felt like a part of life’s regular rhythm. In college I did three study abroads and traveled with friends and with my cousin, and I always assumed I would raise my kids with the same travel patterns my parents gifted me.

Up until now, international travel has not been a financial possibility (or if it has, I have not been creative enough to figure it out!). But now that it is, we have another issue to surmount, which is time. Abe can not take more than two and a half weeks (at the very most) off from work, and I can’t imagine compressing an international trip into that amount of time, especially considering that by the time I was Lydia’s age I had spent almost a year abroad.

Last year we fixed the time issue by just having Abe join us for just part of our summer trip, but when I imagine toting four young children through Europe by myself, my heart fails me just a bit. Ammon, who is addicted to wandering off on his own any time we are in public, would most certainly get lost. Or Clarissa, who always wants to immerse herself in water, would end up in the Thames, the Seine, the Arno or the Danube.

And having meaningful conversations about art or history with the older girls would be impossible because all of my energy would be directed at keeping my younger kids alive and in one piece.

The only solution I can think of is to take the older girls and hire a day-time nanny for the younger kids here at home, and then have Abe and the younger kids join us for part of the trip. Ever since I’ve landed on this solution, my heart kind of does this somersault when I am cuddling or reading to or playing with or watching Ammon and Clarissa. I keep remembering a line from Lincoln in the Bardo when one of the ghosts says of her three children, “They were London, they were Paris, they were Rome!” (or some phrase like that.)

Would I rather be staring at a painting or watching my babies grow? For me, personally, I’d be content to just watching my babies and never leave my home again. Reading widely largely fill that travel thirst for me, and my kids delight me in ways I never imagined before motherhood–and this delight repeats itself multiple times a day, every day.

But I really can’t imagine having Lydia and Mary being almost graduated by the time we finally take them abroad. That sounds insane, especially since Lydia has always been intensely interested in other cultures and Mary is a little budding artist who loves art museums.

So anyway, right now the plan is for me to take them abroad for a month or so while Abe works and keeps to his routine, and Abe and the little kids will meet up with us in Greece and Israel. Of course, we are going to have to wait until the travel bans are lifted and the pandemic is under control. It’s hard to know when that will be, but we’re tentatively planning this trip for the spring of 2021.

So basically the picture is of us planning our trip, which we have spent a lot of time doing this week.

Here is another picture of the girls Abe took outside. They picked the first tomato of the season this week!

Clark, Swathi, Soren, and Meera left at 4am this morning and Ammon wandered into our room frowning.

“Where’s Soren?” he asked.

“Soren had to go to his home, Ammon. He’s in Seattle.”

“Oh, no!! That wasn’t supposed to be for more days,” he pouted.

I had the sad job of informing him he miscalculated the calendaring, and then assured him that we would see his cousins again soon (hopefully!!!).

Then Abe and I daydreamed about things we want to do after the pandemic. It’s so sad because right now Abe can work from anywhere in the world…but for obvious reasons, we are home bound. After daydreaming a lot, I spent a lot of time googling Airstream remodels.

We also cleaned the house. Abe went to help his aunt with some phone issues and did the grocery shopping while he was out. He also played basketball with the kids in the evening. It was sweet looking out the window at all these people I love having fun outside together. I also read more in my book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I got really excited when I checked the back cover and discovered the author is half Filipino like me! I can count on one hand the half white-half-Filipinos I have met in my lifetime, and I always feel resonance. I don’t know if it’s my bias, but I am loving the book.

Also Abe got a cute picture of Ammon playing in the basement. He was building a maze.

In the evening we all drove to Heber and hiked the Cottontail loop trail. It was much, much more accessible than last week’s Silver Lake climb. Both Abe and I independently thought it reminded us of an Audoban trail we visited in New Mexico. I think it reminded us of that one because it was so peaceful and there was no one around.

When we got home we all ate Indian takeout before the kids jumped on the trampoline until bedtime.

Here is a video of the kids jumping.

Artwork

Mary is our most prolific artist in the family. She churned out the below pictures while in Bear lake. Since we said goodby to Bear Lake today, I’ll start with her picture of the Bear Lake beach.

Aside from reading 3 or so books on the trip (Lemony Snicket Books), Lydia also got involved with artwork. She did a fun game where she folds up a piece of paper, and then each person draws a piece of a monster without seeing what any of the other pieces look like. It was a lot of fun!

The kids watched TV while we packed up and got everything ready to go. Also, while we packed, Clarissa pretended to be an owl, and other kids played along. Here is a video.

Once we were all packed, we drove home, enjoying music from Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys and other artists. We also listened to a “How to Train Your Dragon” book, which is by far my favorite children’s audio series.

Back at home the kids were adorably playing dress-up

We were so glad Swathi and Clark decided to come back to our place for two extra nights when their son Soren asked them to. It was so nice to spend more time together!

For dinner, Swathi made amazing grain bowls for everyone. They were sooooo gooood!!!

Fossils!!!

I may have mentioned this before, but a couple of days ago when I was standing in line for dinner, God lined things up so that I chatted with the people behind me in line and learned about American Fossil (because they like to go there), which is just past Fossil Butte Monument. Before talking with them, I was researching things to do, and I literally had Fossil Butte National Monument pulled up on my phone when I started talking with them.

That story means a lot to me because for multiple people in the group, fossil digging was a highlight for our trip. Personally, it was my favorite part. We woke up early, and were out the door before 7AM. We arrived at American Fossil at about 8:30. On the way, we saw a bunch of cows, including young cows that were so cute:

Once we arrived, they taught us about the fossils (they are 53 million years old), and they told us about the types of things we would find (fish, turtles, stingrays, poop etc). They also gave us instruction about how to hit the chisel and split rocks into thin layers.

Once we were all set and received our instructions, we got cracking! Here is some video footage:

Group

Lydia

Clark and Soren blew us all away with a whole fish they found in one of their rocks. Here is Swathi holding it after it was cut down as well as a close-up.

Here is a really great one that Lydia found. I was so happy she kept going even after she was frustrated at not finding much. This was a great find!

Also, Swathi found a whole fish, and Lydia got a very good looking fish as well. When we were all done cracking rocks (for about an hour), we loaded up the fossils we wanted to keep into a cart and then our guide cut them into smaller pieces for us.

The group loved fossil hunting. It was such an awesome experience, and it was made even more amazing by our subsequent visit to Fossil Butte National Monument. That amazing site had a timeline of the world that started way out on the road as you headed into the National Monument. Then, once you arrived, there was a walking path that covered the most recent 500 million years or so (the signs on the road were in the billions). The signs talked about the different living things, geological and meteorological facts, and extinction events etc. It was amazing to comprehend how much happened on our planet before humans even arrived.

I believe Fossil Butte is located at the same ancient dried up lake that we were digging at, so the fossils seen below are (I believe) at the same time period as our fossils (about 53 million years ago).

I loved the below display and it seems like the kids did to. I just loved envisioning what the world was like 53 million years ago before the lake dried up.

Outside Clarissa was so cute looking out of the binoculars and so I got a ton of pictures and this video.

Here are some more pictures that I got from the visitors center. The first one is a cross section of the type of limestone that we split looking for fossils.

The kids played hide and seek outside and it was adorable so I took a couple of videos.

Video of kids playing hide and seek

Vdeo of Clarissa counting.

After that, Lily, Lydia, Clarissa, Ammon and I went to the beach while the others stayed in at the Bear Lake House.

It was a wonderful day!

Clark’s Birthday and more beach time.

Last night I went to bed around 11:20 because I was too tired to stay up and puzzle with Lily and Clark. They stayed up puzzling, bonding, and talking. Not sure when Lily came to bed, but I’m guessing it was around 12:30, and she had a lot to tell me. She felt so affirmed talking to Clark because he both shared and understood her angry feelings towards the church. It was especially nourishing for her to share that dialogue with her brother because in Orem, Utah, she is surrounded by so many people that can’t understand the decisions she has made. But Clark understood completely. The Church fractured their family growing up and he has spent a lifetime observing Mormons from a distance. He has observed that every family has been fractured by the Church and he feels that the message of family friendliness is actually a cover for the way Mormonism shatters relationships. He asked Lily how she handles allowing the cycle to continue with our kids, and it prompted Lily to rethink how we are raising our kids, which prompted us to discuss it later in the day. We landed on the same basic approach of raising the kids halfway in the LDS church and halfway in the Community of Christ church, with the potential to end up entirely in the Community of Christ church, mostly due to the desire to gift our children with spirituality, a thirst for God and religious practices and understanding, reinforcement of values we want them to learn, identity, connection to their past, family, friends and neighbors, and with as minimal amount of toxicity and dysfunction as possible. Even though our approach remains the same, I had a refresher course on some of the pitfalls and perils we are due for if we are not careful, and I’m so grateful for a wife that will chisel out a nuanced path with me that can satisfy both of our visions and desires for our children. I’m also so glad she could have that nourishing talk with Her wonderful brother. They also got on the topic of end of the world scenarios (environmental decay, genocide etc) and Lily was also scared out of her mind about what life will be like for our children and grandchildren. I tried to say peaceful calming things. I always love talking with Lily.

Then at around 3 in the morning Clarissa woke up crying for a glass of water, so I got that. Then around 6:20 in the morning, Lydia had a massive nose bleed and Lily and I both got up to take care of that. There was so much blood on the comforter, you would have thought she lost an arm. Amazingly, I got most of the blood out of the duvet cover, and the duvet, the bedpost, the couch cushion cover (that for some reason was in the bedroom, and the carpet (when Lydia swallowed blood, she gagged and coughed up two big blood globs on the carpet). I got very short with her after the blood globs, because I was exhausted from two night wakings, and I thought I was done cleaning blood, and I had gotten back into bed and then she yelled for me to tell me about the carpet. After I got the carpet clean, I was in a better mood and was nice to her again. Sweet girl just had a doosey of a nose bleed.

The silver lining was that I was up early (I did not get back to sleep), so I just blogged and caught up completely.

After blogging, I had breakfast and hung around with everyone, and helped to serve lunch and clean. I also scheduled our fossil adventures for tomorrow. I’m am jumping out of my skin with excitement for tomorrow’s fossil adventures.

Georgia and the girls had fun flying some toy airplanes she got for them. Here are some videos of them flying the planes:

Georgia

Mary

Lydia

Also, Ammon was showing me new Haka dances and Soren showed me his silly dance.

Around 2:00, we all took off for the beach. Here is Georgia waving us off:

The beach was such a blast again! Before getting into the water, I took Mary to the restroom (she has had about a week with no accidents and we think the Miralax helped clear out and restart her system). On the way back, I say this neat purple flower cactus thing (whatever it is).

Then I took to the water with the kids. To mix things up from yesterday, I bought a little adventure boat (in addition to two more inflatable stars since those were so popular) that the kids can ride around in. It said it could hold up to 120 pounds. I figured that was a loose guideline, and tried to ride it with Mary, but I got out after taking water into the raft. After that failed attempt, we stuck with children only riding in the raft, and they had such a wonderful time with it. First I took Mary and Ammon towing them on a long ride. Then I took Lydia and Clarissa (with Mary hanging on and floating on her star), and then Ammon joined in so I was pulling all four. My heart felt so full pulling all of my children on the beautiful lake. Then, to my delight, Lily came and joined us, and we had a wonderful family moment. I took off a piece of oar to make it more kid-sized, and I used it like a sword to fight hephalumps, taking a page from the Christopher Robin movie we saw yesterday. I also let Ammon squirt me with his squirter and he thought that was so hilarious when I yelled (comically) from it being cold.

I did get some good smiles with my hephalump fighting, but Clark was the real crowd-pleaser. He took Ammon and Soren on a boat ride. He told them that they were going to cross the entire lake, and then he added in extra adventure by giving them rough water. I was delighted to catch it on camera. What a fun uncle for Ammon and father for Soren!

Crossing the lake

Rough Water

Then I went to the beach to see this happy scene of Lydia, Meera and Swathi enjoying the beach and water.

And I was not at all surprised to then find Clarissa playing in her favorite element, water of course. Here is the video.

A great time was definitely had by all. After the adults had their fill (the kids could have stayed forever), we picked up food and drove home.

At the house, Lily and Lydia finished the national parks puzzle. Lily said it was one of her favorite puzzles she has ever done. Thank you Suzanne!

After we all ate dinner we started the festivities for Clark’s birthday.

We lit candles on little cupcakes. Here is a video of the cake blow.

Then Clark started opening presents. He got books from me and Lily (picked out by Lily) and also money from Georgia for more children’s books.

He got airpods from Swathi. Swathi knew what to get him because he is always borrowing hers. I thought it was funny when Clark says he always feels guilty for borrowing Swathi’s airpods, but the guilt never stops him from borrowing them. He loves airpods!

Then we all put the kids down and went to bed early because we have an early start tomorrow for fossil digging.

I just have to sign off with a happy birthday message for Clark. He is an incredible blend of intelligence, quiet strength and kind-heartedness. He is a deep thinker, and is well-informed. I find him to always be someone worth listening to. He is fun, good natured, and warm. It was a blast to throw the football with him today! Perhaps my favorite thing about Clark is his heart. He does an incredible job informing himself about the world and living out values that make the world a better place. He’s an amazing family man, business man, brother to my wife, son to my mother-in-law and friend to me. He’s pleasant, strong, humble, insightful, fun, and steady. Always a joy to have around. He has certainly found his match with our brilliant and loving Swathi, who I also can’t say enough good about. Clark, may your 35 year be your best yet! Also, here is a birthday card Mary made for Clark that I captured:

Georgia’s 75th Birthday and North Beach

Today was Georgia’s 75th Birthday! Most of the festivities were in the evening, so more on that later in the blog!

The day started with a trip to North Beach, the most famous beach of Bear Lake because of its abundant pleasant sand, I am sure.

We had a lot of fun building sandspas footbaths. Mine had a throne on it.

Then we had a lot of fun burying Ammon!

We also buried Clarissa who was slightly less cooperative, so she only got buried half way.

The inflatable stars we bought at a nearby shop were a hit! Almost everyone spent a lot of time floating with a companion on a star. Poor Lydia got a burn on her upper legs near her butt. We must have missed that spot with sunscreen. This lake was so fun because it is only 1.5 feet deep out for 100 feet or so from the shore. It was like a giant wading pool and we all had so much fun!

Lydia, Soren, and Ammon were making a rock collection when it was time to go. Lydia insisted I get a picture.

After the beach, I went on a run from our house into town and back. It was crazy intense because of the two-mile uphill on the way back! After the two mile push, I walked the last 3/4 mile to try to cool down.

After my run, we all took family photos, which is what Georgia always loves on her birthday. We finally got everyone looking on the last one!

Then we had a spaghetti and leftover dinner that was delicious!

After dinner, we started the Christopher Robin movie and then we had a delicious assorted cake that had four sections, German chocolate, red velvet, carrot and chocolate. Here is a video of the cake blow.

Then Georgia got some beautiful water bottles from me and Lily (which Lily picked out) and a card from Mary.

After that, the adults and older kids finished watching Christopher Robin while the babies were in bed. Christopher Robin is a new animated/live action Winnie the Pooh movie about Christopher Robin growing up and losing his inner child, but finding it again through the help of Winnie the Pooh and his other friends from hundred acre wood. The scenery was mind-blowing. Also, I was so touched and entertained by the movie, and I loved the message of making time for fun with the people we love most…having time for nothing which leads to the best something. I also loved the mindfulness message at the end when Pooh says, “Today is the best day. Yesterday, when today was tomorrow, that was too much day for me to handle.” It was a lot like Mary Poppins in terms of its message and plot. I absolutely loved the movie.

I also absolutely love Georgia. She is going through very intense things with her health right now and it is amazing to watch her courageously try to walk the line of knowing when to fight and when to surrender. She is caring, loving, courageous, kind, and I have never met someone who so willingly serves all those around her. It was so fun to chat and watch a movie with her today and celebrate this incredible milestone with her. Happy 75th Georgia!!!