When the babies* are at Nana's House. . .

. . . the rest of us can go SNOWSHOEING!  Have you ever done this?  It's incredibly fun.

 You can hang on a branch.

 You can model your stunning borrowed (the girls') or military surplus (mine and John's) footwear.

 You can pose in front of the gorgeous Uintah Mountain scenery.

 And you can fall on your duff again and again and again.  Favorite quote of the day, "Quit whining, Mimi, and just use your claws."  (This from Liv, referring to the crampon on the bottom of the snowshoe.)

We'll definitely have to get some kids' snowshoes of our own and do this again.  Does anyone want to join us?
*Bella hates it when we refer to her as one of the babies.

If We Worked for the Forest Service

The Ashley National Forest offers some of its old Guard Stations for overnight stays.  They offer cabins, with bunkhouses, running hot water, and electric lights for as little as $35 night.  It's an opportunity to experience what it would be like to live as a park ranger.  (60 years ago, but that's fine.)  What a bargain, right?  

Here's what I learned:

1) My kids love to play.  The more dirt and trees, the better.  Add a bridge, their Grammy, Grampy, three cousins, some pipe cleaners, and an outhouse, and you've officially discovered heaven.  

 2) As much as I already dislike heights, I dislike them even more when I see pictures of where my husband took my children while I was elsewhere.  (Do you see those tiny colored specks?  Yes, those are people.  People who are related to me.  The horror.)

 3) Babies can sleep anywhere.  So can seven-year olds.

 4) My mother-in-law is charity personified.  She volunteered to sleep in this quite possibly rat-infested bunkhouse with all seven children.  (Our children plus Chris and Krista's.)  I took a tiny amount of pity on her and kept Maddie to sleep with us in the main cabin.  In the mornings, I almost didn't dare ask how it had gone, knowing my children as I do.  She never complained.  Let's give this woman a hand.

 5)  It turns out that this little cabin was equipped with neither running water nor electricity.  Since I had only stocked myself with enough fortitude and cheerfulness for a "cabin" adventure, I rapidly depleted my reserves when I realized it was going to be more like a "tent" adventure.  (Since hot showers are my therapy of choice, I can get a little testy when denied one.)

6) Vanity is superfluous baggage in the mountains.  Toss on an old ball cap, put on an old race shirt and your hiking boots, and you're set.

Labor Day Adventure

I think I've mentioned before that John's Jeep has become our little adventure vehicle.  With all of the Uintah Mountains basically at our doorstep, and an iPhone to stuff completely full of topographical maps, we regularly head out on little expeditions.  Yesterday was one of our most adventurous.  

After an hour-and-a-half drive, we headed up the trail for a mile-and-a-half.  Bella started out as leader. . . 

 . . .while the three of us older ladies with aching joints :) pulled up the rear.

 Soon, however, it because necessary for the oldest and frailest of us all to do the packing and the pulling.  Bella kept telling me she was "dying".   (John says that when we are traveling up the road like this, in a block, it makes him think I need to start singing "Get out the way of me and my crew-crew-crew.")

 This is, quite possibly, my favorite of all the lakes we've visited yet.  It was absolutely gorgeous and the ground around it was not marshy at all.  (The mud cleanup after some of our lake visits really puts a damper on my enthusiasm.)

As we were trying to find some fish in the lake, we heard rocks falling from the cliff.  When we looked up, we saw this:

 Zoomed in:

 Did you see the mountain goats?  We only had John's phone camera, so the pictures aren't as good as if we had the real camera, but yay!  Six mountain goats.  Two grownups and four babies.  I kept thinking that if I was the mama mountain goat wandering around on that narrow ledge with my tiny babies, I would be a nervous wreck.  "Babies!  I want to see at least two of your feet touching this wall at all times.  No, I do not care how your dad is walking.  He can make his own crazy choices, but unless you listen to your mother I'm going to make sure you never comfortably lie down again!"

The real mountain goats, of course, inspired my own little babies to scamper around the rocks.  We escaped nearly unscathed--nothing a few bandaids couldn't fix.

Happy Labor Day!

Drive-In (Can you believe we have one?)

My  brother Pete came for the weekend, and we started our celebrations by heading to the drive-in theater here in Roosevelt to see "Brave."  John sacrificed and stayed home so Maddie wouldn't have to be awake until 11:00 p.m., but the rest of us got our Mango Kookaburra licorice, a bag of chocolate covered cinnamon bears (AMAZING!), and some homemade kettle corn, and partied it up.  (Well, we partied it up until our movie was over, but we didn't stay for the double feather of "The Avengers".  I'm not a brave enough soul to keep three little kids up 'til 1:30 to see a violent superhero movie.  I don't think they'd ever sleep again.)

Some of our favorite things

Maddie's favorite activity is to shove as many little pebbles down the drain as possible.  When they have to bring a super-industrial vacuum to the hospital parking lot to get those babies out, I'm pretty sure they are going to present me with a bill.

 This tree is the favorite play spot for my big girls.  Zoom in, and you'll see several interesting things.  First:  the treehouse in the bottom.  My fun-loving mother-in-law cleared that space out and hung some small swings as a we thought it would be make-shift, but it turned out to be awesome little house.

 Second, two girls near the top of the tree.  And yes, that is the power line across the photo, just to give you a sense of how high they are.  (They're at least 25 feet from the power line in horizontal distance, but they are definitely higher.)

 And about halfway down, you'll find the third interesting thing:  Bella--doing what her sisters are doing.  Only I've had to put my foot down about how high she's allowed to climb.

And to think, I thought pine trees were only good at Christmas time.

The Undaunted, or mostly undaunted

There is a book (out for maybe two years?) by Gerald Lund, titled "The Undaunted."  He covers, in his partly-historical way, the story of a group of Mormon pioneers who traveled from Cedar City (southwestern Utah) to Bluff (southeastern Utah) via a trail called The Hole-in-the-Rock in wagons to settle a new community.  The journey was supposed to take six weeks and ended up taking more than six months.  (There's that huge canyon we've now filled with water and call Lake Powell right there in the middle of their trail, you know.)  To be honest, I didn't care for the fictional characters Lund added to help with the smoothness of the narrative, but the true stuff brought me to tears more than once.  

I'm attached to this particular trail for two reasons:  #1) My ancestors were among those pioneers.  #2) My dad has been organizing jeep/boat expeditions along this trail for years, and it's one of my favorite family vacations.  A little bit of hiking, a little bit of jeeping, a little bit of boating, a little bit of swimming, a whole lot of fun people (one of the requirements my dad sets forth is that the participants have to be willing to keep a pleasant disposition the whole time) with some fabulous spiritual history thrown in.  It's wonderful.

We just completed another successful expedition.  Timeline as follows:

Wednesday night:  John and the big girls arrive at the houseboat moored at Halls Crossing.  They sleep there in order to get two hours more sleep the next morning.  That was genius.  The little girls and I were in Monticello.  Maddie stayed with my sister-in-law Kelly (I'll henceforth refer to her as Saint Kelly), and Bella and I met up with the group in the morning.  Breakfast on a houseboat is obviously exciting.

 Thursday morning:  Bella and I get on one of the houseboats with the boat group, and John, his parents, and the big girls head out in the intrepid jeep group.

 The pictures honestly make everything look a lot tamer than it really is.  And you'd be correct if you thought that jeeps should keep all four of their wheels on the ground at all times.

 Elisa Rogers, my math teacher and Young Women's leader of yore, drove the entire trail by herself.  She is amazing.  50 points for Gryffindor!

 The jeep group hiked five miles at the end to meet the houseboat group at the lake.  We had food ready.  In fact, the group always had food ready.  It seems fitting, you know, to commemorate a pioneer group that nearly starved to death by gorging ourselves at every opportunity.

I had five of my six brothers there (sorry, Dave), and it was so much fun.  They are really the funniest people I know.

 Bella refused to get out of her pajamas except to trade them for a swimming suit.  I don't know why I ever pack clothes for her.

 Annie and my dad.

 This little guy is my nephew, Quinn.  He looked at all the rocks on the beach and then looked at all the people he was with and realized that none of the rest of us were going to do a thing about all those stones that needed to be tossed into the lake.  It was up to him alone.  He took his responsibility very seriously and I think he put in a good four or five hours every day, throwing rocks.  Non stop.

 Friday morning, we boated over to the Hole-in-the-Rock, an incredibly steep slit in the canyon wall that the pioneers had to blast their way down (when you look at it, you cannot believe that wagons ever made it down).

 Mimi loves a good hike.  She made it all the way to the top.

My brother Rob recreated a photo we took of him and Olivia 8 years ago.  (This is one case when the reality is not as scary as the photograph.)

 Here's the original.  Wasn't she a tiny little bug?  And doesn't 21-year-old Rob look 12?

  Next on the agenda:  Tubing behind a boat.  Annie was a great sport to take my little girls with her.  Mimi loved it with her typical enthusiasm (even though she looks less than enthusiastic), and Bella thought it was fun, but she just couldn't . . . keep . . . her. . . eyes. . .  open.  When we got her back in the boat, she fell asleep in 2 seconds flat.

Until she got to wear Annie's fabulous sunglasses.

Olivia found two adventurous buddies.  They were a fabulous trio.

Saturday morning, all of us Wellses hiked our way back up the trail.  Naomi and Bella were basically hauled all the way up by one Anderson brother or another.  We got into "Old Whitey" (as John affectionately refers to his Jeep), and within 10 minutes, we were stuck in a hole.  Awesome.  (In the interest of full disclosure, this is only the second time in John's vast four-wheeling experience that he has gotten stuck.  That's important information in the preservation of John's manly ego.)

Brother Pete was struggling with hair in his eyes.  Does any self-respecting mother of four girls ever find herself in a situation without a comb and some elastics?  I took care of the problem.

And my brother Josh, in a Hole-in-the-Rock first, driving my grandpa's thirty-year old Jeep, found himself high-centered on a five-gallon water cooler.  (That red one on the right.)  Both the jeep and the cooler escaped unscathed.

We made it back to Monticello a little more tired, a little jostled and windburned, and a lot happier.  Do any of you want to join us next time?

Soccer sticks?

We are not a particularly athletic family. In fact, "not particularly athletic" might just be mega-understatement when applied to this Wells-Anderson combination. My junior high volleyball coach would honestly laugh whenever she put me onto the court.
And considering John's open antipathy to most organized team sports, we are lucky that our girls acknowledge sports exist at all.
However, when an evening of beautiful weather is combined with free baseball tickets and a hot dog dinner, we are in. Which is why we were found at a South Bend Silverhawks game, hosted by Memorial Medical Group.

We ate some chicken and hot dogs in a box (A box!), and then we headed down to find some seats to cheer our team on to victory. (As a note, I want to point out that I love to watch baseball. It's not too fast, like a basketball game. It's not SO SLOW, like football can be. And--this is really the clincher--it's absolutely chuck full of numbers. Numbers that they flash all over those Jumbotrons. So many fun numbers.) This is where I was struck again with our athletic incompetence. Because, when Mimi asked me "Which team is our team?" (a perfectly reasonable question), she added "Are we the guys with the soccer sticks?"

Yes, Mimi, we are the guys with the soccer sticks. Except we call them baseball bats.

This is how a crazed new reader cheers for the "Silverhocks." (Because a crazed new reader brings a notebook, pencil, and crayons wherever she goes.)

And this is one of the ways an almost-two-year old entertains herself during a baseball game. (Actually, she alternates laying on the concrete and coloring with bugging the blond teenager ahead of us by patting his back and calling him "Uncle Dallin.")

We were lucky to meet our good friends the Masons while we were watching the game itself.

And four little girls can enjoy at least six innings of a baseball game by making repeated trips to the bathroom and drinking fountain.
So, for all you non-athletes out there, don't pass up trips to the ballpark.

Do you appreciate cows?

I love Chick-Fil-A. They always have some sort of crazy free promotion going on, and the last one was Cow Appreciation Day, where you can dress up like a cow and get a free meal. We couldn't pass that up, but we don't have cow costumes on hand (like Leisy, here), so we had to get a little creative.

First we each colored our own masks. (Is there anything that can't be Googled? Seriously, four seconds on the internet gave me at least 17 options in the way of cow masks.) Olivia went traditional, white with black spots. Mimi went with the Red Angus, I was a Jersey (or a Guernsey? I don't really know my cow breeds), and Annabel colored herself up something exotic in blue and purple.

Then I ironed irregular freezer paper spots onto our outfits (Mimi's fell off in the car, and Bella refused to wear her prepared spotted shirt) and made us felt bells on ribbon necklaces. (This is why everyone needs both a felt stash and a ribbon stash. Who knows when one will be called upon to make a cowbell?)
The "chikin" was delicious. (Free makes it more delicious, don't you think?)

Chicago Jaunt

Now, I didn't mention this before, for fear of someone undesirable learning my husband was out of the country, but John spent a few weeks recently in Bolivia, working as a volunteer in a Christian hospital outside Cochabamba. (He is responsible for telling his stories from that trip, and I will be nagging him with gusto until it is appropriately documented here on the blog.)

In order to start his trip off with a bang, we went a day early to Chicago to party hard before we sent him to the airport. I had grand visions of Buckingham Fountain and Millennium Park (two of my favorite places to take the girls), but the rain was coming down in buckets, and we realized that we really had never given the Field Museum its time to shine. (We LOVE the Museum of Science and Industry and visit it every chance we get. This is due in equal parts to the sheer coolness of it--the hatching chicks, the farm machines, the TRAIN, the foam catapults--and the free neighborhood parking.)

So, we compared our hands to Bushman's.

And made gorilla faces.

And lounged on Egyptian litters, pretending to be ancient princesses.

The girls were appropriately horrified and intrigued by the idea (and reality) of mummies. They enjoyed a 3D movie with John, which Bella and I avoided, knowing the naughtiness that would ensue. In short, it was fantastic, and I coveted the big-city life yet again.

Then we spent the 87 years in traffic that it takes to get from downtown to the suburbs (where our hotel was), and I remembered why I love living in small places. South Bend traffic delays me five minutes, maximum, when driving to or from downtown. Aaaahh. So nice.

We Googled restaurants in Wood Dale (our suburb) and found that Sweet Baby Ray's, which is John's favorite barbecue sauce, had a little spot not two miles from where we were staying. YUM! I heartily recommend a pulled pork sandwich with sweet potato fries. (I also heartily recommend not trying to move for 3 hours after dinner. That was a lot of food.)

The front desk kept forgetting to bring a crib to our room. In fact, for some reason, they first brought a mini-fridge to our room instead of the crib. I mean, a fridge is useful and all, but Bella couldn't really lie down easily inside, and I just didn't feel comfortable shutting the door on her to make it dark enough for her to sleep, so we were forced to send it back. This was John's alternative to the crib.

Yes, that is the armoire. At first he kept one door open, in order to avoid future accusations of abuse, but when she just kept oh-so-casually sliding herself out the door, he shut it.

And she fell immediately asleep.

Naomi slept between the beds on the floor. That's her favorite hotel sleeping spot. This left Olivia with an entire bed all to herself. And when you have a bed to yourself, how should you sleep?

That's right. With your feet on the pillow and your head under the comforter. No wonder Mimi prefers to sleep on the floor.

We sent John off the following afternoon. I felt like I spent the time he was gone with my pressure-relief valve permanently locked down. My poor kids. My good friend, Stacy Andrew, said this about her husband recently being gone for a couple weeks, "It's like I've been without water." Thank heavens my water has returned safely.