Missour Trip - Days 5-8

LEISURE TIME

After Neil & Amy's wedding on Saturday, we stayed over with Neil's sister, my other cousin, Sarah.  They've got a beautiful new house and we basically had an entire floor to ourselves.  We were slackers and were so exhausted from the day/night before that we didn't wake up on time to go to church.  I would have loved to have gone because that's the ward I was in when I was first baptized 8 years ago.  There were many people I would have loved to see.  Alas, I couldn't drag myself up.  And if I had, the boys would have been on their worst behavior considering how tired they were.  That's not the impression I would have wanted to leave my friends with.  So we slowly got showered and dressed and headed back up to my mom's.  It had been a shorter drive to get to Sarah's late at night, and everyone else was at a hotel all night, so it just made sense to stay there with them. 

On our way back up to Mom's, we stopped to take THIS picture:

Isn't that fun?  Being a Ginger who has had Gingerbread items gifted to me for years, I have come to love them!  And wouldn't you just want to travel down this road to see if you'd find a happy little house made of sweets?  Anyway, I'm silly and I liked it, so we stopped to take a picture.

That Sunday night, my mom went out to mow "the back 40" (it's really 7 acres and a lot to mow, even on a riding mower) and the boys ended up riding in the little trailer behind her with blankets.  They enjoyed it so much that, even when Mitt started falling asleep, they didn't want to go back inside!  It was adorable!

That night, as we lay in bed, there was one heck of a storm!  You've all enjoyed a nice lightening storm every now and again, right?  Yeah, well, this was NUTS!  There were some tornado watches and warnings across the northern part of the state where we were, and the lightening was constant.  The wind was blowing at 70+ mph according to the weather reports, which sounded like it may as well have been a tornado trying to blow the house away.  And the lightening, really... it was so constant that the sky stayed lit an interesting blue color more often than it went to the dark black of the night sky.  It went on for hours.  In the morning, we found large branches broken off of trees and blown far away from where they came from.  It looked like the edges of a tornado had ripped through.  It was absolutely crazy.  There were even shingles from the roof blown off the house.

 As we were surveying the damage, Mitchell had come into our room and cuddled into the bed with his borrowed stuffed animal... a bear that he called Monkey.  Isn't he cute?

Monday night was crazy, too!  I had about a 5 hour nosebleed, very similar to the one my mom had a month or so before.  Hers was so bad that they had to cauterize it and pack it tightly for several days to make it stop bleeding.  I had Ben give me a blessing, and it slowed and finally stopped after that.  Guess it's time to start taking my Floradix (iron supplement) again.  I was glad that it hand ended on time for us to leave Tuesday morning!

 After saying goodbye to the kittens and cats....

 

more goodbye's to Grandma after having a large and delicious breakfast...

 it was time to hit the road with some very sleepy boys.

 

One more goodbye to Grandma...

 and a big goodbye to the tiny town of Mooresville.  Yes, it really is as small as I've told you it was.

 Old Chicago in Nebraska for lunch...

 and a dead bird on the front of the car later...
and we finally were in Wyoming for the night at a hotel.  We spent a little time eating dinner and talking/playing with Ben's family before quickly getting to sleep.  We had left early, early, early since the last time we made this trip was the day we had the big flat blown out tire.  We wanted to be sure we had plenty of time to get there and play with family.

 The next day, Wednesday, and we were ON THE ROAD AGAIN!  I absolutely LOVE having the DVD players in the car, and especially the headset so that we didn't have to listen to their movies over and over again.  Instead, Ben and I listened to "Ender's Game." 

 

And because I think it's adorable, here is my van full of sleepers!  All 3 of them!  I adore them so much!

Well Grandma, Ashley, Elizabeth, Aunt Mary, Neil, Amy, Sarah & Family, Philip, Sarah, and little Lilly...  It's been fun!!  Can't wait to see everyone again!  I'm not excited about the drive, but it's not so bad that I wouldn't encourage you guys to drive on out sometime!!  We loved seeing you and the boys begged for you days and days later.  It was a great visit, a great REASON to visit, and made some wonderful memories for us and the kids.  Thanks for making it great!!