Egypt: Camels

Ok, another quick post before the day gets going. 

After going into the Great Pyramid, we went around the back where we met Michael Jackson and Alibaba. 

Michael spewed a shower of slobber on our guide.

Michael was excited to get the Americans off his back.

This muslim family was staring at us more than we were at them. I offered to take a family picture for them in front of the sphinx, but due to the language barrier and my electronic ineptitudes, I accidentally took several selfies of my forehead with their phone. We finally called our guide over who took a group photo for us with our new friends.

Iris got a lot of lip action on this trip. Her first kiss was the sphinx, then she kissed a dead fish on the shore of Galilee, and then a rock formation in Wadi Rum.

Egypt: Part 1

 We are back and many be almost done with jet lag, but I think teenagers have perpetual jet lag, so maybe not. 4 weeks, 4 countries, 3 continents. 

Favorite moments:

Elijah: Sacred grove

Claire: Hot balloon ride in Luxor

Iris: Dead Sea

Sybil: Garden tomb and the spring where Gideon whittled his army down to 300 men (she gave a talk on these 2 stories today)

Caroline: learning about kibbutz life and listening to Noa Tishby's book, "Israel."

David: all of the religious sites

First Stop: Cairo, Egypt.

When I got called to serve a mission in Chile, I ignorantly thought I would be eating tacos and salsa. I stereotyped all of Latin America based on Tex-mex. Unfortunately, I did the same thing with Africa. I thought all Africans had dark skin. This ignorant American was schooled. 

We arrived in Cairo at 2am after 30 hours of travel. The streets were filled with people celebrating Hajj, which is the muslim pilgrimage to Mecca festival. The driving was a bit chaotic; another day I saw kids flying a kite on a major highway, cars stopped in the middle of major highways, all kinds of people just a few feet away from cars going very fast. Elijah said he'd love driving there and Claire, who is getting her driving hours in for her license, was horrified.

Pyramids of Giza 

Climbing to the entrance of the Great Pyramid

At the entrance, the path was high, but then it got steep and small.

The final room where the tomb was

For all of our time in Egypt, we had a government-issued guard accompany us. There was a different one every day, but all of them had huge bulging guns under their suit coats. 

Ok, I'm going to have to break this trip up into about a million posts because I'm taking a summer Public Policy class that I haven't participated in for a month, Claire needs to get in a total of 50 hours of driving before her license test in 3 days, our good friends from Mexico are staying with us, and we are getting Elijah ready for his mission (shots, interviews, etc). Life is busy! 

At least I've covered the first hour of our trip.

FSY and reunions

David offered the kids $150 each if they left their phones at home during this epic trip. Elijah is a no-go because one month without Grace is painful enough (they are out for a final brunch). Claire just met a cute boy at FSY, so she's a no-go also. I'm holding out for Iris who still isn't back.

FSY pics:

I don't know how Beckham's mom got them to take this picture. but I'm pretty sure she used magic dust.

Claire and Mikayla

Last week I had an epic girls' trip. Six ladies from LSMSA met in SLC to see Sarah McLachlin in concert.  Since Claire and Iris were in girls camp and Elijah was finishing up his last week working at a law firm, I made a last minute decision to bring Sybil. And I'm glad I did; she kept things spicy and blended in supremely with her endless energy and, most importantly, her hemorrhoid, colonoscopy, polyp, and diarrhea spelling bee. Please note that in most of the following pictures she is wearing the same shirt (the pictures were taken over several days) because, "MOM! I showered last week!!" 

Oh man, I had so much fun with these ladies!

So many memories, although I will admit that these women are so dang intelligent and impressive that I felt a bit underwhelming. But I knew how to spell "diarrhea" with Sybil by my side, so I'm a little impressive also.

I went for a solo hike early on the first morning. We had been up late the night before, reminiscing around Lexi's kitchen table. Lex was nice enough to host 5 of us.

Group hike

Dinner at the Capitol where there was a large group sending off a statue to DC.

Sybil and I did my favorite dance move in tandem on the capitol lawn: The Worm.

I brought my yearbooks which we scoured.

At the concert, our bags were checked. The security guard found my mint breath spray and asked me what it was. I opened it, squirt it in my mouth and said, "Just in case I need to kiss someone." 

Of course a joke; I was in rare comical form last week.

The next morning, 2 of the ladies left and Anna and I met up with the other two ladies at Courtney's house and had homemade pizza from a stone pizza oven.

After, Sybil and I had an adventure in the ER because the powerful vacuums at the carwash weren't powerful enough to remove the mysteriously placed earring-back in a little ear canal. "It just fell in there while I was sleeping!" 

That thing was lodged and no amount of tweezers, bulb syringe, suction, and lavages could remove it. Alligator forceps at the Children's ER did the trick.

We also got to visit my Aunt Cheryl who showed us her paintings and advocated for Sybil becoming the next great painter of the family.

We picked he up the next day to see the movie IF.

On Sunday we drove to church with my cousin Kristyn, hung out with her family, then returned for afternoon naps since we attended my mission reunion that night.

Sister missionaries are awesome! I had forgotten this, but our president created a whole zone of Hermanas, complete with sister zone and district leaders. There were some emergency transfers when the higher-ups found out about it.

Another blast from the past:

Recreated:

I was planning to only stay at the reunion for a few minutes, but stayed much longer, even leaving 45 minutes late. Sybil and I didn't roll into Vegas until after 2am. I thought catching up with people after over 2 decades would be awkward (even with all 3 groups: high school, cousins, mission), but it was actually quite glorious. I love people and I love remembering.

Here's a picture David sent me while I was gone. 

We have a goal as a family to go to the temple once a month.

Next post will be after our epic trip!  

Now I'm off to mow the lawn...

An epic journey awaits

It's before 7am and I'm sitting on my balcony in my sweaty running clothes. I hear birds and basketballs at the court across the street. David is at the temple. Sybil is asleep in my closet--her bedroom when nobody else is here to sleep on the bottom floor with her. Iris is on her way home from FSY. Elijah and Claire came home early from FSY last night so they could have one last night with their friends before our most epic family trip ever. In about 8 hours we will head to Egypt, Israel, and Jordan. Yes, Israel is the middle of a war, but we are severely risk-averse and this has been our goal since before our kids were born: we would travel to Israel as a family before our first left on a mission. Family togetherness becomes more complicated once the first leaves the house.

So, I'm tying us loose ends; I've finished all of my June Relief Society birthday visits, conducted ministering interviews, met with the presidency, submitted all of of Public Policy assignments that are due before we return, enrolled in my Fall classes, contacted my work and volunteer offices to say that I will be MIA, and have packed part of the family (the rest will come in the next few hours. The last step is returning a huge stack of library books, buying dog food and diarrhea medication (I was told to expect the runs in Cairo, and I am determined to be prepared this trip because I definitely was not prepared in Panama), packing up the last 2 children, getting the house clean and prepared for a solo, depressed, and potentially destructive dog, AND catching up on blogging...we'll see how this goes.

Here are some pics from Elijah's graduation weekend. These two girls were the only ones who made it to the end of the hike with me. Then Sybil insisted on rock-climbing and only stopped when I got too scared to proceed and prohibited her to ascend.

Back flipping is Sybil's new thing

The crew. I think this is right before they all headed out to get Korean shaved ice.

This kid is excellent and a bit eccentric at tines. One day I found an 8-foot car part on the side of our house. I assumed that it came from Serhii's truck. But through deduction, found it belonged to Elijah. His minivan with the blown-out speakers and bald tires (from acceleration, I presume) also has parts that drag on the road, a collection of multi-colored bird poo, writing on the windshield that's at least 3 months old from when it died, was parked it illegally, and was the towed. He said that maintaining a clean, respectable minivan might identify him as a suburban mom, which is unthinkable.

Ordained an Elder

Claire's sweet 16 may have been overshadowed by the graduation and ordination, but she was a good sport and we had a lot of extra family in town to celebrate with her.

Oh my Claire. David precepted all of Elijah's pre-license driving hours. This time, the dude has fallen to me. half of them were completed on the way back from Louisiana, but we've also gone late at night (when cars are sparse). Claire told me once, "Telling me that I have to be on one side of the road is discrimination and segregation." Claire is so woke. I asked David to let her drive home from FSY last night because she really needs to get in the hours. He had her pull over after a few blocks. "I don't have the stomach for this," he said.

Zoe stayed a few extra days

We went to the Coke store on the strip and sampled 16 coke flavors from around the world. Of course Beverly from Italy was the most repugnant. Claire told Iris she would pay her $1 to drink the whole glass of Beverly and then upped the ante to $5 if she also drank the Fanta Melon Frosty from Thailand, which was similarly nasty. Of course Iris did it, and then Claire said, "I wish she suffered more. I want my money back!"

This is our dear friend Linda who Sybil and I visit regularly. Linda asked Sybil to do her makeup and unfortunately told her that her favorite color is blue = matching blue makeovers. I'm quite sure Linda's face sparkled with glitter for days after.

Girl's camp for my girls

Ok, I think I can get up-to-date with one final post, but I Iris just got home and the others will probably wake up soon. We'll see...