Winter didn't give up so easily this year. Our final snowstorm took place in May, and as much as I actually do enjoy the winter in a non-Stockholm-Syndrome way, it had darn well overstayed its welcome.
After the obligatory two weeks of gray blah between the snow taking its leave and plants daring to grow, we woke up one morning to find that green-up was officially underway. The snow melts first over the waterpipes that grid the post, and is quickly replaced by dandelions that seem almost gaudy after the long white of winter. A few days later, you go to bed and the trees are naked and embarrassed, and then *poof* you wake up to a riot of green and some over-ambitious flowers.
Three guesses where the waterline is.
1 week later.
It's pretty cool.
As always, once spring is even peeping at the door, life starts to take on a frantic pace. The girls and I did an overnight turn and burn to Anchorage to go to the Temple. It was Bren's first time to do baptisms, and it was a good experience all around. Well, at least the temple itself was good. Within the first forty-five minutes of the six hour trip I had pulled over to clean up Claudia, who decided that the best way to start the trip was barfing up everything she had eaten since she was born. She wasn't listless or grumpy, so I chalked it up to gas or spite or demonic possession or any of the other reasons small children suddenly upchuck. This set the tone for the trip: She threw up twice more between Cantwell and Anchorage, and then passed the baton to Echo for the trip home the next day. Neither one was really thrilled to have their vomit-soaked clothes peeled off them in 20 degree temperatures, but they should have thought about that before ralphing all over themselves repeatedly every hundred miles through Nowhere, Alaska.
It also snowed both coming and going. Because Alaska.
(Tangent. Vomit, especially someone else's vomit, is already pretty awful. It's actually worse as a parent since the natural and very reasonable instinct to jump out of the way inexplicably mutates to the irrational impulse to TRY AND CATCH IT.
I've obviously been scarred. Let's keep moving.)
The next big adventure was Rick's surgery. He had some work done on his shoulder. Everything was textbook, and his three weeks recovery period kicked off the first five weeks out of our entire marriage where we didn't have anything to do but hang out with each other.
This was taken right before he kicked me out of the pre-op room.
We walked a lot. We took the girls to the trails around the university. Other than the frenzy of the first mosquitos of spring and one well-intentioned but oblivious slap to an injured shoulder *sheepish grin* it was a success. We continued to walk a couple miles every evening, enjoying the increasingly later sunsets.
About 11 at night.
This little butterfly sat on Leah's hand until we forcibly removed it.
This is 3/4 of the way up the ascent, and pretty much how we all felt.
After a couple of weeks, Rick felt good enough that we decided to go camping down by Salcha to help with a church service project. Probably not the best choice we ever made. I started us off by getting Bertha stuck on a tree root and several inches of mud.
I'm sensing a theme here, Bertha.
After a long-suffering maintenance man pulled us out, we found a flatter, drier campsite and set up our tents. We started a fire and made smores, sent the girls on a snipe hunt (Bren was not amused when the truth about snipes finally came out several days later*), and bedded down for the one of the most uncomfortable nights of sleep in my life. We had a cold snap at the end of May and the unexpectedly bitter chill was unpleasant, especially when coupled with the nearby campers who partied until 1 a.m. and the idiot bird who was confused by the sun not going down and screamed right above our tent all night. The girls woke up at 4, and so Rick and I were up for the day, too. Rick's shoulder did not react well to a night on the ground, either, so after helping to make breakfast and cleaning up, we left early. Points for trying, right?
Rick found a hollow log. This was the result. He was super stoked.
Around midnight. It's about 40 degrees, too, but you can't tell.
NEXT TIME: The first vacation ever where we didn't visit family.
*So, a few days after camping, I told one of the girls to stop sniping at me. Brenna pops up, all interested, and asks, "Sniping--does that come from the birds, like, the sound that snipes make?" I decided it was time to come clean, so I gently broke the truth that there were no such things as snipes. I watched the realization dawn on Brenna's face as she remembered the hour and a half that we had let them bang rocks in the trees (and even corrected their form/sound). She just looked at me with dead eyes and calmly said, "I really hate you guys."**
**She's reading over my shoulder and just informed me that I still suck for doing that. One day we'll look back and we'll both laugh instead of just me.***
***I'm laughing now.
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