UT

The kids and I made our way down to Utah last week, leaving Jefferson behind to start up his business. A brave move, I know. Me + three kids + a six hour drive = danger. My cousin and her cute little family (not so little now that they added twin boys in July to their already family of four) was going up for her husband's conference and I haven't seen her in years. We were roommates in college our sophomore year, both dated and then married boys that were in our singles ward, got married just a couple of months apart, and have added seven children between us since then. Not to mention the years of wonderful memories before then as we swapped back and forth every summer between our homes in Arizona and Oregon. We were also born just two weeks apart. We are good friends, to say the least, so we were well over due for a visit.

The drive went surprisingly well. The kids were super happy the whole way. When we pulled into Provo (insert wave of memories here) we met up at a park and let all the kids run around, minus Jett, Tyce, and Taytum who were pretty content to lay there on the blanket. Our seven kids weren't all though, my sister and her daughter Reece came and met us there as well.

After a few hours of playing we went and had pizza at Sam and Nikki's house (thanks for opening up your place to our herd of little ones).

The next day we went walking along the Provo River for a couple of hours. The kids kept themselves entertained in these leaves for a good 20-30 minutes:

Then we hit up the mall for lunch and played at the play place in the mall for another couple of hours. I was shocked at how entertained the kids were. Carter and Kaleb were great at paling around together... a little too great. We were wrapped up in the other six kids when we noticed that Carter and Kaleb were missing. After a quick sweep of the play place we started walking down the mall corridor, only to find them three doors down in the toy store. Carter was behind the counter on the phone and Kaleb (and Evan too actually) was just tearing up the toy shop playing with all the toys.

All of us cousins in the area met up for dinner at Five Guys, burger and fries for dinner. Delicious burgers, PS.

Then to finish off the evening we headed up to the Beane Museum of Science up on BYU campus. After all my years of school there I never made it into the museum. It was a great find. It had tons and tons of stuffed animals (actual animals that were stuffed) and lots of bugs and they were actually doing a live presentation and the boys got to pet a snake. After a couple hours there we were ready to hit the hay. (NOTE: I don't have a whole lot of pictures. It was hard to get the camera out when it was just me and Deedee and seven kids all age four and under)

The next morning we met up at the park again for a delicious bagel breakfast, played a little bit more, and said our goodbyes. Hopefully it won't be another three years before I see this cute little Bell family.