Halloween!

I don't know how the rest of the moms I know manage to take such great pictures of their kids in Halloween costumes.  I usually forget to take pictures at all, so it was great to have John's phone at the ready to capture our group halfway through the trick-or-treating.  (Of course, I also planted us directly in front of the setting sun.  Sorry if you feel blinded.)

From oldest to youngest, we have John, the Bad Doctor (he's our supervillain); me, Witchtastic (and I really wish you could see more of my awesome black-and-orange tights); Olivia, The Speedy Paintbrush; Naomi, aka Magnificent Mimi; Bella, aka Fireballa; and the small and daring Mad Madame Maddie.

 My mom and dad joined us for the whole week of Halloween.  However, my dad is the world's biggest Halloween Humbug, so he didn't come along for the trick-or-treating.  (He stayed home and handed out glowsticks to the two trick-or-treaters who bumbled along to our house.)

 We posed heroically.

 We dashed heroically out of scary houses (accompanied by Mario and Rainbow Dash).

 We posed heroically again.

 We delighted heroically in the enormous piles of candy we were heroically gathering.

 And we talked, heroically and at length, about our superpowers.  The Speedy Paintbrush can wield a magic paintbrush and make her paintings come to life.  Magnificent Mimi scores well on spelling tests and saves people from falling rocks.  Fireballa throws balls of fire at bad guys, and then she runs really fast.  Mad Madame Maddie mostly just runs down the halls of houses yelling her name.  (I'm sure that terrifies supervillains.  The Bad Doctor regularly finds himself stymied.)

P.S.  My sister also escaped Provo with her darling boyfriend, and the two of them were the champions of the extended trick-or-treating that my two older girls accomplished.  I have Annie and Shaylor to thank for the sugar high we've all been riding the past few days.  I

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.

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.)

Grapes of Wrath

Most of our furniture has been with us since we got married.  I call the look "med-school chic", and for the most part I am very happy to repaint, refurbish, restyle, and just live with it.  However, when my lovely sister-in-law Lauren informed me that her very stylish sister was selling all her furniture and moving to China (wouldn't that be exciting?), I immediately grabbed the opportunity to update my old living room look with some of her used furniture.  ("It's new to us" is my mantra.)

However, when I purchased the items, we were in John's little Sentra and two hours from Roosevelt.  Considering we are the only people in the Uintah Basin who do not own an enormous truck, I was afraid we'd have to rent a U-Haul to get my newfound furniture finds to my house.  And then I remembered my dad and his trusty pickup, Old Whitey.

 This truck has nearly 300,000 miles on it.  The make and model are listed, officially, in the Consumer Reports Auto Buying Guide as a "Do Not Buy."  However, my dad and Old Whitey are determined to prove Consumer Reports wrong.

 Can you imagine the looks my dad was getting, as he drove through Provo Canyon and over the passes of Wasatch and Duchesne county with an eight-foot sofa, a large club chair, a big Expedit bookcase, and eight baskets (plus two boxes of fabric from my mom) in the bed of this little truck?  I don't think you can tell, but he had to buckle the spare tire into the front passenger seat so everything could fit.

He, my sister, and Kathryn loaded everything by themselves*, and when I called to see how it had gone, he asked me, "Have you ever seen The Grapes of Wrath?  That's what it looks like."

I agree.  It's awesome.

*The original plan involved my dad and I loading the furniture--I didn't plan to shirk my furniture-lifting duty--but then the schedule changed and it worked out this way.  Awesome and easy, but a little guilt-ridden, for me.

Sisters

My only sister is eleven years younger than I am, so I feel like I grew up in a family of boys (six brothers will give you that impression).  Because of that, I'm new to the sisters dynamic in my house.  So, any of you with sisters, enlighten me if you will:

Did you have a sister whose greatest joy was to either tie you up with the jumprope and call you her trapped elephant or tie the jumprope around her waist and make you lead her around like a dog?

And, if you did have such a sister, was your greatest joy to try to be just like her, even if that meant putting on seven pairs of panties in a misguided attempt at imitation?

And, if both of those were true, did you still feel the need to whack her face every five minutes, just to make sure she didn't get the wrong idea about your adoration?

Because, sometimes--I'm telling you--I just don't get it.

Cousins

My family has a tradition of meeting at my great-grandpa's cabin the week after Christmas to lounge, watch movies, play games, and eat good food.  This year, we added Rock Band to the mix, and (if I do say so myself) I became a semi-proficient drummer.  Those high school years of bass drumming paid off.  

Another part of the tradition is putting the babies in the sink for a bath.  These two little girls are exactly two months apart.  Last year they looked like this.  

This year, they were walking and babbling, and almost good friends.

Ruthie, however, obviously has better hair.

Well, maybe she doesn't always have better hair.

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?

New Family Photos

We met Denise, one of my old friends from Toledo, at a cute little farm in Michigan last weekend.  It was so fun to see her before we left the Midwest, and since she is an absolutely amazing talented photographer, she was so kind as to take some family photos of us.  These are a few of my favorites.

Didn't she do a fantastic job?  I love all the color.