Overwhelmed & Overloaded

That is what I think of when I look back on this summer.

Overwhelmed.

Overloaded.

As I sit here watching "One-Hit Wonders of the '80s" on VH1 (#7 is Modern English's "Melt With You" by the way), I can not believe I'm even coherent enough to tell you all about it.  I know travelogues are boring but if I don't document this in some way, well, what is my posterity gonna know about the summer of 2010??  I mean, right?  Their future testimonies might depend on this post, you gize!!

I'll do a quick overview here today, with pictures to keep it interesting, and then I will go back in future posts and get more detailed (again, for my posterity, not for indulgent nonsense purposes).

JUNE 24

Photographed one of my favorite people of all time for her senior pictures while the boys ventured off to Cub Scout Day Camp.   I present to you Taylor.  I wish I were her when I was 17.  Funny, friendly, charismatic, spiritual, adorable....she's the total package.  If she didn't think it was so awkward I'd hang out with her on the weekends. 

(#4 is Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny" just FYI)

JUNE 26

Maggie has a vet appointment where a "full geriatric panel" was done on her blood, she got her yearly shots, etc.  Her blood work came back perfect & we started her on some arthritis medicine (which I promptly ordered 3 months worth of totaling about $180).  I know this seems random but it's important information for later.

JUNE 29

Fly to Las Vegas, where I meet Kimi, and we hitch a ride from Jespy to Bako for some Eclipse fun.  I didn't get my camera out, like, at all so click here for all the deets on that.  We ate at a restaurant three meals a day (my stomach still hasn't shrunk back to its original size), hung out with the Visors, saw the midnight showing of Eclipse about 2 feet from the screen, played games, chatted like school girls, saw Eclipse from a normal distance the second day, and ate way too many caramels.   I loved that trip.

JULY 2

Drive back to Vegas with Jespy & Kimi, hit the Pawn Stars pawn shop (Rick, Chumlee & the Old Man weren't there...bummer.  Neither was the disgusting son thank goodness) & fly home to Denver.

JULY 5

Drop Maggie off at our friends' house north of Denver and head to UT for a two week vaycay chock full of reunions & family fun.

JULY 6

Our friends call us and say that Maggie is "not doing well."  Her breathing had suddenly become labored & she wasn't moving or responding.  They take her into an Emergency Animal Hospital where it's determined she is in congestive heart failure.  After some discussion of options we decided it was time to let her go.  We all bawled & bawled all night and still have moments of sadness.  She was our baby before we had babies!  We've had her for 12 of our 14 years of marriage.  The worst part was being in Utah & having to make the decision but, at the same time, I'm almost glad I get to just remember her wagging her tail as we left her in Colorado.

It became more of a reality when we got home & she wasn't around the house.  I've had to stop myself from finding her before I got to bed or checking the back door to see if she's there waiting to go in or out.  I also hadn't realized  how much we dropped on the floor at meal times....we are total slobs.  I had no idea that Maggie had her own chores she did everyday (cleaning up our mess) but that does explain her being overweight. Oopsy.    She was a good dog & will be missed.

JULY 9&10

Camp Beaver (which is code for Gty's mom's side of the family's family reunion) in Ogden, UT.  Again, no pics taken by me.  I just enjoyed the meals, Olympics & night games and visiting.

JULY 11

My sweet Uncle Visor passed away after a four year struggle with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).  I have never been so glad to have just been to Bakersfield in my life as I had just visited with him a couple weeks before.

JULY 12-15

 Bear Lake reunion with Gty's side of the family.  I will do an extensive post on this later but rest assured, there was never a dull moment.

JULY 16

I fly to LAX from SLC.  I meet my parents there and we drive up to Bakersfield for UV's funeral.  How adorable was he, huh??

JULY 21-24

Go to Girl's Camp.  More on that later.

JULY 24

HotPants & fam stop by on their way through Denver.  They were supposed to stay the night but decided to just stop for dinner & keep going.  Apparently driving with sleeping kids is easier & more pleasant than driving with awake kids....whaaa????    Fine.

Also on JULY 24

Gty & the boys flew to SanFran for some boys' trip fun.  They went to a Giants game, an Oakland A's game, toured Alkatraz and then headed up to Eureka where Phil's family lives.   This means Beebs & I have been here alone all week.  I've been decompressing from the summer's activities while trying to keep Beebs entertained.   But the summer festivities will continue on....

JULY 30

The boys return from their trip.

AUG 2

Beebs starts gymnastics.

AUG 3

JBird starts his tackle football season with four practices a week in August!  (TBone will be starting soccer soon too but I'm not sure of the exact date)

AUG 4

The boys start school.  5th grade for the JBird and 3rd grade for Tbone.  This is the first time I'm dreading it.  It's too soon to get back on a strict schedule and I feel like we haven't even been home.  Ah well,  unless I'm gonna homeschool I guess I don't really have a choice here.

AUG 17

Fly to Boise for my side of the family's family reunion.  Well, really my Dad's and AV's side of the family.  It'll be a good time.  We were waffling in our decision of whether we would go or not but now that the tickets are booked I'm excited.

Are you still reading this?  If so, you probably won't be surprised to find out that "Come On Eileen" was the #1 one-hit wonder of the 80s.

ESP & Co. Part Dos

DAY FOUR

Day Four was Sunday...Father's Day and Cord's 12th birthday (and Memzy's bday too, btw)!  You'd think that with all the events that day I would have taken more pics but no, that one above is all I gots.  Homer & Beebs eating the bday/father's day cake.   That morning was my first "Wha?" wake up moment as I woke up to find out that Homer had spent the night throwing up.  Jenny and Anthony had been up all night scrubbing floors, doing laundry and teaching Homer to barf in the toilet while I had slept like a rock not hearing a thing.   Thank goodness I had shown Jenny where I keep my disposal gloves.     Gty had gotten up early that morning to go to his meetings but then came home and flopped down on the bed in his church clothes with a fever & proceeded to sleep 4 hours while the rest of us went to church (minus Anth & Homer).  I'm going to have to recreate my annual Father's Day pic one of these days and fake like it was taken that day.

DAY FIVE

Gty had to fly out at, like, 6:30am on Monday morning.  Thank goodness Anth offered to drive him to the airport!  I slept in and then, again, woke up to WHA???  I came downstairs at about 9:30am to find Jenny & Anthony fully dressed sitting on the couch.

Me: Wow, you gize are up & ready to go early today.
Jenny: Well, we had to go to Urgent Care.
Me: ::confused look on face::  Huh?
Jenny: My neck was hurting so bad last night I couldn't sleep.  After Anth got home from taking Gty we looked up an Urgent Care place and went as soon as it opened.
Me: Are you srs????

I'm not used to being woken up by shocking news, you gize, and this was starting to become a habit.

So Jenny got some sweet meds and started feeling a bit better (meaning she could turn her head almost 2 inches to either side) and we planned our day.  Little did we know it would turn out to be one of our busiest ones yet.

We headed off to Heritage Square in Golden, CO which is basically a glorified Fun Spot (for you Boiseans).  You may remember we spent a day here when I had my family reunion here last summer.  There are go-carts, rides, and most importantly, the ALPINE SLIDE!

Waiting to go up on the chairlift ^^ on the chairlift below:

 

At the summit! Please note the Denver skyline in the background. 

Here are all the boys lined up to go down:

But these two stinkers had to wait for their moooooommmiieeeessss  ::said all Nelly Olsen-y::

Luckily no one got lost on the way down.  These are the only gize I beat down the hill. 

Beebs saw these heart chairs from afar (they're in front of a little ice cream shop) and insisted on taking her pic like this sitting in one. 

Have you seen on YouTube how someone will do a video and then there are "reaction videos" or spoofs of said video?  Here is the boys' reaction/spoof shot:

Adorable.

 We then returned home and explored the tourist traps a little closer to home... like the creek behind our house.  The older boys caught a frog & claimed to have seen crawdads (?). 

 And we sampled the tasty vittles of a little local pizzeria here called Papa John's while sitting around the front yard and enjoying the cool evenings of Colorado.  A game of HORSE might also have been played on the driveway which, shockingly of course, came down to Jenny and JBird.  JBird won.

 When it got dark we came in and Anthony played a game of Dominion with the older kids while Jenny entertained the young'uns in a rousing game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

 ::sigh::

"Good times" doesn't even begin to describe the fun we had.  Despite some medical issues I think the Espys had a decent time as well.   I am sooooo hoping this is not the last time they grace us with their presence.   The kids love each other, Anthony & Gty only had a few spats (Anth is so uptight!) and if you've read GITYD at all, you already know the magic Jenny & I create when we get together.  It's a can't miss family vaycay!

So, what was YOUR favorite part of our get-together?

ESP & Co.

We had some house guests, you gize.

And not just ANY house guests.... these house guests!

Soooooo fun.  They have been kind enough to host us on two occasions thus far so we were happy to be able to provide them room & board for a few days.  They were fresh off a family vacation to Pennsylvania and were nice enough to stop by the great state of Colorado on their way home.

I'll break up the activities & pictures into a couple of posts to save your scrolly wrists undue injury and also to keep your jealous rages to a minimum.

Day ONE (Thursday)

As you may have gathered from my last post, day one did not exactly go according to plan.  Since Anthony is a huge nume  nmenst  coin collector,  we were excited to be able to take him down to the Denver Mint for a tour.  Unfortunately their rental car company's slowness screwed that up and we missed our 11am tour.  No more tours available for like, ever.  Luckily Gty had the smarts way back when to book us a back up tour time at 8am on Friday.  Keep reading to see if we made that one or not, mmkay?

Since JespyFam had been up since 4am and had had nothing substantial to eat, we all decided to go get some yummy mexican food and chillax back at the house for a while.  The kids instantly hit it off & the Esperson/Anderlin Family Vacay was officially underway & shaping up nicely.

Unfortunately there were a few things we had going on that we had no control over/couldn't get out of.  One of those things was Beebs' dance recital which was Thursday night.  Due to the tickets being $12 a piece, and me thinking it would be torture for the Esplin boys, Anthony was forced to take his boys and entertain them at the local ice cream parlor while I subjected Jenny to this:

And this:

And made her look at this:

Take a picture of this:

And pose for this:

That photo is a foreshadowing of Beebs' intense love for Jenny which would blossom throughout the next few days.  She became obsessed, basically.  She'd sit on Jenny's lap, play with Jenny's hair, make Jenny have "Girl Parties No Boys Allowed" up in her room, etc.  She loves Jenny loooong time.   But who doesn't, right?

DAY TWO (Friday)

 Operation Get Tony to The Denver Mint was a success!!  Barely.  We were still running to the gate in hopes that they hadn't locked us out again.  They hadn't.  Loved the mint tour, btw.  It's one of those things we hadn't even thought about doing but now we can recommend it to all our out of town guests.   It costs more than a penny to make a penny.  Did I just blow your mind?  Thought so.

So then we hung around downtown for a bit until the Molly Brown House Museum opened up at 10am.

Did you know her name was Margaret and she never even went by Molly?  They aren't sure why people refer to her as the Unsinkable MOLLY Brown but now they have to call the museum that because no one would know who they were talking about if they called it the Margaret Brown House.  Also, NOT good for kids.  At least not kids like TBone.  No touching, no leaning, no talking, no breathing...he was in tears by the end and I about strangled him.  BUT interesting.  And good photo ops around the outside (no pictures inside, of course).

These next two I'm gonna keep handy for their future wedding video.

We then went back to the house and let the kids mess around for a while as we chatted & what not.  Jenny and I were also able to meet up with Standsmom that day for some yummy lunch at Costa Vida.  So, like, just under half of the SF7 peeps were there and stuff. 

Another thing we didn't have any control over was the fact that JBird's baseball play offs started this weekend.   So yeah...we forced the Espys go watch a game that night.  To their credit they acted excited about it.  Luckily the baseball park had an actual playground (not all of them do) so the little kids could run around and get some energy out and we could just sit & watch the game in peace. 

DAY THREE (Saturday)

Since we had all been up early for the past couple of days we took it easy on Saturday and just got up whenever we felt like it.  Tony & Gty went and ran some errands together (adorable!) and then Jenny & I ran some errands (even more adorable!) and Jenny trained TBone in the finer points of WeRule and ZombieFarming.  He now considers her a genius and they, I guess, trade goods between their kingdoms or something?  I'm not sure but if you ever see anything posted from my Facebook regarding this it's alllll TBone.  Just wanted to make that clear. 

We then had more of this that afternoon:

This time JBird was starting pitcher and he did a fabulous job, got an awesome out at home plate while covering for the pitcher, got a sweet hit to the outfield and pitched like a pro.  They still lost but JBird got to end his season on one of his best hits ever so it was perfect.

As far as the Espys go.... well, they figured out how to entertain themselves at the game.

 I'm pretty sure Jenny is tapping fish tanks or building a castle there.  Btw, we took a wrong turn while walking down to this park (I'd never been there before) and ended up having to wade across a small stream and hack our way through thick undergrowth.  We provide exciting adventures when you come & visit.  ::putting that in our brochure::

These two are good buds now. 

No further pictures were taken this day, but after JBird's game Gty, Anthony, JBird and Cord went down to a Rockies game while Jenny & I took the rest of the kids to Toy Story 3.    I thought it was cute but as the credits were rolling I heard Homer shout "That was BOWING!" You need to see it and decide for yourself I guess.

Coming up next, Days FOUR and FIVE, yo!

If you think...

...that getting into the airport at 9am gives you plenty of time to
get to an 11am Denver Mint tour, you'd be wrong. Here we are outside
the locked gates. We will try again in the morning.