Moms Are The Best

Since my husband is TDY (out of town on a military assignment) for a few weeks, my mom decided to come hang out for a week in order to lift my spirits. I honestly do pretty much okay when he's gone, even though I might look like I'm losing my mind if you follow me on Facebook, but it's always good to spend time with my awesome mom.

We visited Tombstone:

Played at the Tucson Children's Museum:

Ate delicious food at Obon:

And found a photobooth at the zoo:

Mom even decided that she didn't hate my cat. She found herself petting Abby and muttered, "What am I doing?"

My mother is basically the very best ever, and I love her tons. She put up with my weirdness and my crankiness, with my road-rage in Tucson (seriously, Tucson. Your streets SUCK and your drivers SUCK and basically I hate you.) and she finds my kids totally adorable. I love you, Mom. Thank you for lifting my spirits.

American Heritage Girls

Our daughters are part of a scouting group called American Heritage Girls. It's very much like Girl Scouts, but with a more patriotic slant. It's also based on Christian values. We really, really love it.

The troop held their spring Court of Honor tonight, and my girls were awarded their Native American and Geology badges. They were so excited! They've definitely worked hard for these, and I'm excited to see how they approach the next few badges that they've chosen to work on. They both want to earn their Golf badge, although that might just be an excuse to spend more time with Baba John (my dad).

Butterflies Are Pretty.

Even though we live in a pretty small town, it has a surprisingly large homeschool population. There are a number of homeschool groups that plan field trips and get-togethers, and one of the most recent ones we attended was a visit to the Botanical Gardens in Tucson. Again, we decided we'd attempt to drug Lillie up and hope for the best since it's only about an hour away (even though she has been known to get ill after 20-30 minutes of driving).

The gardens themselves are quite small, but definitely very pretty. When we go back I'll take more photos. They have a number of charming little spots like a Zen garden and a random model train village. The main attraction for us, though, was the butterfly exhibit.

There are somewhere 120 different varieties of butterflies at the Botanical Gardens. They are all absolutely stunning. I wish I had a better camera (and was a better photographer) so I could capture how lovely they were.

There was a lovely horse statue at the entrance, so of course the girls had to have their picture taken with it,

This is a plant labeled as "Mormon Tea." I have no idea what it is, or what it might be used for. I'm Mormon, and I've never heard of such a thing, but now that I know it exists I think I should probably research it.

  Pictures of lovely butterflies:

And a picture of silly munchkins pretending to be a butterfly. Some of the kiddos didn't want to be seen on camera, so you only see their hands. :D

Right next door to the Botanical Gardens is a building with a sign that says Japanese Gardens. I think we'll have to check that one out on our next excursion.

Yeah, So...

Good gravy, woman. Sure you're going to write a lot. Uh huh. One year later...

I think the biggest hindrance to this is that we don't do much here. In Daegu I felt like we were always exploring and experiencing something new, even if it was just taking the subway another stop down to see what was in another neighborhood. There isn't a whole ton to do in our town, and since Lillie gets motion sickness we don't do a bunch of driving out to Tucson or the smaller outlying towns either.

In any case, we've had a couple of excursions recently that I figured I could write about. Last month we went to a Renaissance Festival in Phoenix. Although it was a bit chancy with the potentially sick Lillie-Mac, we doped her up and gave her essential oils and shoved her head down on a pillow and told her to sleep for the next 3.5 hours. And it worked. Whew.

I have only been to one Ren Fest, and it was more than a decade ago, but it was so much fun. David had never been to one, so we figured it was time to get our geek on. Next year we're hoping to really dive in deep. The boys want to wear kilts, and Lillie wants to wear a princess costume.

We actually had one minor mishap on the way up. About an hour into the drive I looked down and discovered...

I was still wearing my slippers. Oy vey. I'm not even sure how I managed to leave the house like that. Luckily we found a Target and I got some decent shoes (which I had been meaning to buy anyway) and carried on with the day. Aiden, of course, spent the next 8 hours teasing me about it.

The kids are always suckers for these "picture posing" things. For some reason Lillie is in this "Ultra-Derp-Face" phase when taking pictures. I'm hoping it doesn't last much longer.

What man doesn't love a good turkey leg?

And sooo much face paint! At first the girls wanted the three of us to get matching face paint, but then they couldn't decide on what they wanted. Lillie loves unicorns and fairies, and Reagan loves dragons. So we would have had to combine the two on our faces somehow... instead I convinced them it was okay for us all to just express our individuality.

We ended up spending way more money than we should have, but it was so worth it. Our goal was to try to spend more time there than it took to get there, but we weren't sure if the kids would be interested enough to stick around. Luckily there was something for everyone. We're definitely going back next year.

Happy Birthday, Papa Talbot!

We wish we could be with you. In case you didn't see the video, here are the monkeys singing for you. We love you!

Here we are

So after a month in Utah and then two days on the road, we are now at our new post in Arizona. David is super happy to be back in the desert - he grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado and Richland, Washington - but I'm still a bit reserved. It's not so much the lack of trees that is a problem. It's the fact that the entire landscape looks sharp and pokey, like it would hurt me if I tried to run my hand over it.

We have a great new house, though, and the kids are totally in love with Arizona so far. We haven't done a lot of exploring yet, but from what I can tell there is a ton to do here. Lots of museums on post, plus a lot of hiking and camping in the area.

I'll start this new blog off with a video of our new place. Sorry if the quality isn't the greatest. Also, we have no furniture yet because the household goods that are coming from Korea are stuck at some port in a labor dispute. Hopefully our things that are in storage in Washington will be here soon.

Let's try this link to the video of the house...

The Next Step in the Journey

Since we're no longer in Daegu (sob sob sob) I'm closing that blog, and starting this one. I found that blogging was kind of cathartic for me, plus family and friends seemed interested in what was going on. That might not be so much the case now that we're not living in a foreign country, but I'm going to keep writing nonetheless.

We got into Sierra Vista, AZ today, our new home for at least the next three years. We had a month-long vacation with my folks in Utah where we could all sort of decompress and get used to being back in the states.

We went to children's museums:

I went on dates with my husband, and we were baffled by the size of concessions:

We just played with the kids a lot:

And Aiden got to have his 10th birthday with aunts, uncles, and cousins.

And now we're ready to move on. I'm so glad we're able to visit family and friends in the states! I know we're going to be racking up the mileage on our new/old minivan. :) And now... on to Ft. Huachuca!