Jungle Jim's

My mom got us a Groupon for a place called Jungle Jim's a while ago and I finally got around to using it. I wish we'd made it up there sooner!

Anda, Amy, and I met Heather and her kids for some carnival style fun. Anda was not at all pleased with me for forcing her onto the first ride.

But she changed her tune pretty quickly.

She didn't want to get off that one, but I made her try just about everything once.

Her cousins were all very sweet to her, and together we got her on everything except the scary fast roller coaster. I'm not a sadist.

I think that first ride was Anda's favorite.

But my favorite part was the faces she made on the carousel.

Nerd.

Aquarium

I...I mean Anda finally got to go to the aquarium! It was dark so I don't have any good pictures, but it was really cute and a lot of fun. I love me some sea creatures.

More Jeepin

We had an incident with the Jeep a few weeks ago in which Dan got to use his winch and I got to hitchhike out of the canyon. Once Dan felt he'd figured out the problem, we decided to take the cautious route and just go out on a 4 1/2 hour drive with my sister Hannah and my two year old up a friggin mountain.

Fortunately, that turned out to be a not horrible decision.

We saw my house.

Along with some pretty flowers.

And great views.

There were a couple of "it's not going to start again, is it?" moments, but Dan figured out the trick and we made it back just fine.

Can't  beat pictures like those.

July 4 Weekend

I can't remember exactly which day most of these things happened, so they are all getting lumped into the 4th of July/Dan's Birthday category.

We went boating with some friends. Dan did a great job surfing.

Anda did a great job being cute.

I did a great job standing up...

but found that I preferred falling on my face.

And this kid (son of our friends' friend) did a great job being Anda's new best friend, ensuring a fun day for everyone.

Precious.

We also had fireworks, beginning with the sparklers.

And ending with some legal-this-year-only-because-of-all-the-rain aerial and fountain fireworks that our friends got.

On the fourth, Dan and I ran the 10k then met my sisters and Anda at the parade. Which was loud.

Anda hates the Emperor as much as anyone, but that's actually just her new "smile" face, as illustrated again below.

The best part of the Fourth of July holiday is that we get to party constantly because it's also Dan's birthday. Home made ice cream, white cake, and peanut butter frosting to go with your boating, 10ks, fireworks, and parades. Happy birthday, Danno.

The Hubris of Camping

Last weekend, we went up the canyon with some friends to take Anda on her first camping trip. She had been feeling under the weather, but seemed okay with Tylenol in her, so we forged ahead. We are excellent campers. We can handle anything. Let me just insert this explanation of the word "hubris" here.

Dan set up the tent while Anda and I took some pictures.

Nate and Becca brought their two dogs, and the three kids got along famously.

Dan and Nate went to get some wood and brought back a forest. We had quite the fire, which produced delicious hot dogs and s'mores.

And thus ended the fun part. Once it got dark, the dogs kept running out of sight and making Nate and Becca nervous, so we all went to bed. Note that I did not say "we all went to sleep." I don't know how things were in the other tent, but Anda would not let anyone sleep until she was lying on top of me, securely held in my arms. If I tried to move her, she screamed. If I held her in the only way that kept her quiet, my arms froze. The one time I managed to get us both comfortably and quietly situated, an anti-muffler-with-the-brights-on convention immediately drove right past our site and kicked, I'm just estimating here, a billion pounds of dust into the air. When Dan woke up to me crying out of frustration, discomfort, and lack of sleep at 3:00 am, he agreed that it was time to give up. He drove Anda and me home, dropped us off, drove the 30 minutes back to the site to get another 2 hours of sleep, then packed everything up himself. I did feel bad for him, but at the moment, I felt worse for Anda and me. Eventually we all took long naps and felt a little better, and a little wiser, too.

Next time, we will make sure to have a practice run in the backyard, a clean bill of health for all parties, and a quiet, secluded camp site. Otherwise, I'm not doing it.

So, if you ever want to dive in to camping with a 2 year old, call me. I will talk you down.

Ragnar

On Friday and Saturday (the 17th and 18th), Dan and I ran the Ragnar Wasatch Back relay race. Twelve people with two vans take 3 legs each to run a total of about 193 miles from Logan to Park City. It was kind of a big deal so I could go on and on about it, but I will try to be brief.

In short: Dan was awesome. He took the spot with the most miles total (something like 21) and wowed everyone on our team with his ~7 minute pace.

As if that wasn't impressive enough, he then ran part of the Ragnar Hill (3.2 miles on an incline which seemed to call for ropes and carabiners rather than running shoes) when one of our other runners got injured. MVP all the way.

Dan's sister, Heather, also impressed everyone with her speed and endurance. She had an 8.1 mile run up hills that would have made a grown man cry. In fact, there were many grown men there and I'm pretty sure several were crying.

Dan and Heather's van was full of speedy people, so when it came time for them to exchange with us, Heather was the first runner through the exchange. That was very exciting. Our van made short work of that lead, but it was fun while it lasted.

My cousin, Darcy, is the one who put the team together (which turned out to be a lot more work than I would have thought). She's five months pregnant and still completed all of her legs without complaint. I didn't really get a good picture of her husband, Robbie, but one of his legs was the second half of that killer hill that Dan had to do, and as you can see from our finishing pictures, he lived to tell about it.

Not to mention my aunt, Jill, who was practically immobilized by back pain just weeks before the race. Nothing was going to stop her, and nothing did.

My sister, Hannah, took up running even more recently than I did. She did great, even though we both got horrifically sick after our first two legs, thanks to Jill's irresistibly delicious peanut butter protein balls (knowing that oatmeal was a main ingredient should have been sent off some alarm bells in my head, but they were too good). She managed to recover just in time and ran her last 7.3 miler to bring us all through the finish line.

My mom was our personal MVP because she took Anda for two days while we did this ridiculous thing and was there to cheer us on at the end.

We even got to see my sister, Amy, as a volunteer at one of the exchanges.

Also, this guy and Gumby were there. I know the green suit guy ran his leg like that (it was drenched when we saw him halfway through his run), but I really hope Gumby didn't have to.

I didn't really know the other members of our team, but everyone did amazing things and we had a really great (if occasionally horrible) time. We were cursing the race halfway through, but as soon as we all took 14 hour naps, we were already talking about doing it next year.

We'll see.