Capturing Arizona #2

When Elijah was a little baby, I had him on a regimented schedule. He was asleep between 6-6:30pm. Then I had the WHOLE night to myself. Of course I looked down my nose at all parents whose children went to bed after 7. As per always, I become what I mock and then some. Now my kids are in bed at 8, if I’m really lucky. Then they take turns boiling my temper. Iris sneaks downstairs to make sure I’m not having fun without her and Elijah’s ear aches and Claire is having bad dreams even though I try to explain that you can’t have bad dreams unless you first fall asleep. And now it’s almost 10, I’ve been awake for over 17 hours, and I’ve already dozed off a few times while trying to forget that I have to work and write a talk and orchestrate a house sale and an international move and instead have some “me time” (aka. watching trashy news on CNN because I need to know about the bearded lady who ticked off Russia and other such nonsense). And now my sense of duty compels me to update the blog, but the bearded woman fried my last neuron and the cookies in the pantry won’t shut up. In other words, I’m going to take a stab at this, but don’t get your hopes up because my head is about to hit the keyboard.

Arches

One thing we did on this trip was give the kids our old camera to use.

Behind us in this picture is Landscape Arch. In 1991, Landscape arch had 180 tons of rock fall while tourists were under it. Fortunately they heard "thunderous sounds" and got out of the way. I thought of a spiritual parallel while we are there, but can't quite remember the specifics now. The arches were formed after the area had a series of floods and then receded water. The salt from the water stayed and sand accumulated on top. The salt wore away gradually and now the petrified sand is slowly wearing away too.

The kids loved playing in the sand.

great climbing tree

Delicate Arch. This hike had a lot of uphill. We all got tired in the way up. Even iris said she couldn't walk anymore which is ironic since she rode on my back the whole way (David claimed an injury).

We spent the night with David's aunt and uncle in Colorado. The kids loved playing with their cousins. Before we got there, Iris kept asking which kid would be her age. The problem with Iris is that she will keep asking the same question until she gets the answer she wants. To preserve sanity, we had to tell her that there was a girl her age there named Jessica. She was not happy when Jessica didn't make an appearance. The good news is that Claire is starting to warm up to dogs. She said that Jesus told her  to pet their dog (the same dog we tried to tell Iris was her friend Jessica).

Elijah had some tall tales on this trip too. He asked us if we had seen him, "flip in the air one, no five, no ten times and then land by his shoes. That was awesome!"