And back again

While in Utah, my mom and Megan and I took an afternoon to go shopping for my brother Aaron's wedding. He and his fiance Jake have picked some lovely wedding colors, one of which was a lovely rich burgundy color that is pretty in right now. We decided to capitalize on that fact and found some great tops to wear for wedding photos (and on sale to boot! good thing we didn't wait til May to look). 

Also, it was a really fun excuse to hang out with my mom and sister, which is one of my favorite things ever.

Doesn't Megan look swanky in that hat? Seriously, I wish I looked that amazing in hats. She's incredible.

I tried on this flower crown as a joke but then fell in love with it. So now I own it and want to wear it all the time. (And bless Jesse's heart, when I came home and showed it to him, his first response was not "I love you my silly wife" (which would have been completely acceptable and understandable) but "you should wear that every day." BEST HUSBAND EVER).

We had lunch together after a pretty successful shopping venture, and I had this moment where I looked over at these two incredible women that I'm related to and my heart swelled with so much love and joy that I thought it would burst. They are vivacious and rich and wonderful people, and getting to spend some time with them was beyond perfect.

Speaking of girl time, while we were there Megan decided she wanted to color her hair! We went subtle (she's never dyed her hair before!) with some low-lights, and it turned out great! Also, it was incredibly fun and girly and brought back many happy memories of growing up together, so that was a plus too :)

Aaron lives just 20 minutes from my parents so he got to come up tons, which was the best! After sitting and chatting late one evening, Megan, Aaron and I realized that at some point, Aaron had become the tallest and we now formed a sort of staircase if we stood in order from shortest to tallest. 

We arranged ourselves thusly and took a series of selfies, each better than the last. When we looked at them, the one below made Aaron laugh really hard, which made me laugh really hard. I hadn't used the bathroom in a few hours and I forgot to cross my legs (mom fail!) so then my mom bladder failed me and I peed my pants. And then the fact that I'm a 26 year old woman and that I was peeing my pants just made me laugh harder, which made me have even less control of my bladder...you can see where this is going, right?

Needless to say, I had to change my pants. Needless to say, this is now one of my favorite memories.

Before I arrived I organized a big family birthday party and made sure everyone could be there (without telling mom). We have five January birthdays in our family now (Mom, Albert, Jake, Nikolai and Joshua) so I wanted to get everyone there to celebrate.

Luckily, everyone was able to come and it was so good to see everyone! 

After dinner and cake and ice cream, we played paper telephones, which was so funny that it made mom cry. Always a win in my book.

One last memory. Megan and Garett got a Wii U for Christmas so we spent an afternoon playing Mario Kart 8, which was super fun. At one point I stopped to take care of babies so Nikolai got to play, which he thought was the BEST THING EVER. 

Here, he and Megan are lost in concentration:

And then we headed home! We had some shenanigans with delayed flights on the way home too, but luckily we found out about them before we went to the airport, so while it made us arrive home later (after midnight! blech!) at least we didn't spend as much time in airports as we might have. 

My cuties, watching planes as we waited:

We had a really short layover in Chicago and had to go through an underground tunnel from one terminal to the other. It was lit with these incredibly beautiful rainbow lights, and I really wanted to take a picture of it but all I got was a series of super blurry, trippy photos like the one below. But in retrospect, the photo below is kind of what flying with two kids felt like: lovely, because I love them, but also weird and what time is it anyways? What time is it where we are flying from, and what time is it where we are flying to? Did we have dinner? Did we miss dinner time because we were in the air? Should we have taken naps? What day is it? What is happening? WHO AM I?!?!

So in summation: it was a lovely trip. We are glad to be home, and we miss our loved ones!