Spanish Fork has funded a number of social spaces since we moved away. They built a beautiful new library, for example, as well as this beautiful splash pad. I think they got an all-abilities playground and there's talk of building a recreation center as well. Not everyone is happy about these plans, finding public spaces to be superfluous to society (I'm friends with many of these people on Facebook), but I personally love to see my tax dollars at work in this way! Public spaces are so important to communities!
I'm sad that they didn't have anything like this while we were there, but we survived without them...and got to enjoy them when we visited!
Grandpa suggested that we spend the day at the splash pad with our cousins on Tuesday the 13th, so that's what we did! Emily had driven down from Idaho with her kids; they stayed at Uncle Jacob's house. We didn't expect Uncle Jacob to come to the splash pad (because we were under the impression that he had to work), so we were surprised when not only Emily but also Jacob showed up! It was fun to have them both there. Andrew, Emily, and Jacob had a nice little visit together while the kids played.
Carter and Dean were with Aunt Shayla this particular day. Aunt Shayla had taken the boys to go stay at her mom's house...because Jacob just recently asked her for a divorce. But Jacob hadn't yet told any of us this (silly guy), so there was some obvious tension in the air surrounding things unsaid. I believe their split is public knowledge at this point (like, I think they've signed papers and everything). Jacob is living in a friend's basement up in the SLC area and Shayla is in the house with the boys for the time being. So, yeah...that was a bit of a...tension...throughout the day. But it seems like things are going better now.
Anyway, Carter and Dean missed out on the fun, and we missed seeing Shayla. But the rest of the cousins present had fun together.
Below are some pictures of them playing (I'll try—but will probably fail—to limit the commentary):
On Tuesday night (June 20) we slept in Rexburg, a city in Idaho, at the AmericInn where I slept on a couch. The next day we had a two hour drive to Yellowstone. It took us a long time to get to the entrance gate, but once we got inside the park things were smooth sailing.
We started to drive a twisting mountain road. A few moments later we saw steam rising off of the hills.
Mom said we should probably pull over to explore, so we drove down the road to investigate and stopped at a parking lot next to a trailhead.
The drive from Devils Tower, WY, to Mount Rushmore, SD, is only 2 hours and 20 minutes (130 miles or so). Alexander, who had been feeling find at Devils Tower began wilting at Mount Rushmore.
It's been so long now that I can't quite remember which of the children got sick when. Phoebe got sick first. On a Sunday? I feel like it was on a Sunday. Was it on June 18th? Andrew ended up going home from church early with her because we realized part way through sacrament meeting that she had a fever. She was a miserable baby all day Sunday, but woke up feeling better on Monday.
Zoë was the next child to get sick. I can't quite remember when she got sick, but her illness followed the same trajectory as Phoebe's. She felt sick for a day and then felt better. She must have been sick on Monday because I don't remember her feeling sick while we were traveling and we were counting our lucky stars until Alexander started feeling sick at Yellowstone (June 21).
At first he attributed his feelings of malaise to breathing in vapours from the geysers and things, so he kept saying that he wanted to "get out of here," away from all the steam. Now, granted, "toxic gases may accumulate to dangerous levels in some hydrothermal areas"so he his assumption wasn't necessarily unwarranted. But everyone else seemed fine, so we were pretty confident it wasn't toxic gasses (and we didn't spend a ton of time at any particular hydrothermal area).
But, boy, that steam was just blowing into his face and stinging his eyes! And that sulphur smell sure was giving him a headache!
It took us an embarrassing long time to realize that he had, in fact, spiked a fever and was downright miserable. (Fortunately, all our activities were outside, so we felt we were giving others plenty of fresh air around us).
He was so happy when we finished dragging him in and out of the car at Yellowstone and let him have a big, long rest in the car while we drove through Wyoming!
The next morning he was feeling much better, as we assumed he would be (if his illness followed the same course his sisters had experienced), and was running and climbing all over everything at Devils Tower. As I mentioned, however, he began to wilt at Mount Rushmore.
Here we all are standing in front of the monument (you may also note the thunderstorm gathering behind the hills):
We have come to the conclusion that our hallway bathroom is officially cursed.
When we bought the place, we knew we'd have to redo the bathroom floor. We still haven't done that, but we knew that we would have to do so eventually. The tiles are all just falling apart.
For a while the shower was leaking into the basement, but we got that fixed.
And then the upstairs bathroom fell into the hallway bathroom (both bathrooms were cursed, honestly).
And then most recently we found out that we'd screwed our towel rack into a pipe in the wall.
As we stand, our ceiling has "naked" drywall up (to replace all the drywall that fell down when the upstairs collapsed into the downstairs), the tile floor is completely cracking up, and we have a couple of lovely holes cut into our wall.
Well, today, Zoë was washing her hands and...water started running out of the bathroom cabinet and streaming all over the floor.
The sink pipes have completely corroded and just...popped apart!
To fix it, I think we'll have to do something like this (which doesn't look too complicated):
Uncle Rod has a lovely piece on exhibition at the Springville Museum of Art, so visiting the museum was on our list of things we had to do while in Utah. We unfortunately didn't get to see Uncle Rod in person, but it was fun to see his photograph.
We came home from Utah to a leaky basement and ten billion fruit flies in the kitchen.
I'm supposed to be working on my thesis right now, and I am! But I'm also taking a quick break to write a few funny stories about our day. Because those are important, too. Perhaps more important? Like so many things in life that are seemingly less pressing but ultimately more important.
I really ought to hurry though because we're under a severe thunderstorm warning (it's already getting dark and stormy outside) and we all know what happened last time we were under a severe thunderstorm warning. To that end, allow me to share some pictures of Grandpa's house and yard (which suffered quite a bit more than our house and yard):
The tree that is resting horizontally in this picture? It used to be vertical.
Today was Rachel's birthday and in the spirit of Throwback Thursday, we had a massive storm roll through right at dinner time, which knocked out the power, so we celebrated her birthday in the dark...just like we did four years ago!
Fortunately, Miriam had already finished decorating the cake and Andrew had already finished cooking dinner, so all we really had to do was break out the candles and finish eating. The lights flicked off and on a few times before snapping off completely. This was soon followed by a big crash, which set half the table to screaming.
Grandpa was sure our house had been hit by lightning, but it was only a branch that had landed on our roof. Alexander and Zoë were already panicking and Phoebe evidently wasn't feeling too safe, either, when I decided to stand up to find the emergency candles. At that point Phoebe started screaming bloody murder, so I sent Rachel and Miriam down into the basement to find the candles while I calmed down the children. And then we all finished our dinner (which was orange chicken, made by Andrew (who didn't eat any because he doesn't like chicken)).
After we finished eating we got the cake ready...and went outside to assess the damage to our house (which all seemed to be superficial, thank goodness—when Grandpa went home he discovered that his neighbour had two big trees topple, though both trees decided to land away from any buildings, which was good news).
Here's the cake that Miriam made for Rachel:
This morning (after catching up on reading the blog), Alexander spontaneously ran to me, gave me a big hug, and said, "Mom, thank you for creating Heissatopia! Because I love to read it and remember good memories about our family!"
I realize that sounds nothing like what a five-year-old kid might say, but rest assured that Alexander often talks like a 90-year-old man and he routinely melts me into a puddle of sentimental goo.
The other night I heard my door creaking shut around 3:00 in the morning.
Quizzically, Phoebe was not in bed with us yet and I knew it was not her in the hallway because the light flicked on and then off really quick. I decided to get up and investigate what was going on and found Alexander slowly turning circles in his bedroom. He was suffering in terrified confusion, unsure of what his next move would be.
"What's up, buddy?" I whispered.
"Oh, Mom! You're awake! Good!"
"What's going on?"
"Well, I woke up and it was dark and I was afraid! I tried to turn on our fairy lights but it's so dark that I couldn't find the switch, so I thought I would turn on the hallway light—but I made sure to close your door first so that I wouldn't disturb you with the light—but then when I turned the hallway light on it was too bright even for me, so I turned it off and then my eyes felt like things were even darker than before and I want to go back to sleep but I really need a light on and I don't know what to do!"
I helped him switch on the fairy lights (a string of gently-glowing LED lights), tucked him back into bed, and didn't hear from him until the morning.
He's just the sweetest little thing though.
(I mean, sure, he has his rough and tumble moments, but overall he's just the sweetest little thing!)
First, I should warn you that there are a million pictures from our short stop in Goblin Valley. And although Goblin Valley is a whole lot of fun to visit...there's not really a big variety of things to do there. You just kind of...run around in the desert...and climb on hoodoos and things.
This means that pictures will very likely outweigh my text. This happens routinely with my Goblin Valley posts.
Even though Goblin Valley is an interesting place to hike around and explore it's apparently not a very interesting place to write about—I believe I ran into the same problem while discussing Goblin Valley last year [when I said "the trip could be summed up as: we climbed on rocks—a lot"].
In short, we climbed on things, we jumped off of things, we played in the dirt, and we got hot and sweaty.
This year was no exception. We hiked around. We climbed on things. We had a blast. And...yup.
There are, however, a few important stories to share...
The drive to the Aquarium was pretty smooth. Even though it was our first "long" drive all being crammed into our van together, there wasn't very much fighting, and Phoebe was pretty good. We got there a little earlier than Naanii, Bumpa, and Josie, so we were walking around the outside, which had an interesting structure, a surplus stage from a U2 concert that the Aquarium bought.
The time that we arrived at the monument was just perfect it was approximately two hours before all off the people and tourists started to arrive. We could just park literally anywhere, so we chose a parking spot a little walk away from the visitors center (we did not go in it; we took the booklets from a news stand outside, and mom took the badges from a box that said Junior Ranger Supplies (Mom edit: Hey, if they didn't want us to take them, then they wouldn't have left them out in public like that (and I made sure the kids did the work))).
One interesting thing is that more than twenty tribes in the area want to rename the monument because the tower which they call Bear Lodge is a sacred place for them so the word devil in the name is offensive to them. A misinterpretation made the name Bear Lodge into Bad Gods Tower, which was made into Devils Tower by some dumb interpreter.
After we got the books we realized that there were no pencils so we decided to do them in the car after we were done at the monument.
At 865 feet tall it is a behemoth but people still climb it! Wow!
It does not take days to climb but if you are adventures and like climbing and have a few spare hours on your bucket list then do it with the help of a ranger.
Another cool thing to see in June is all of the healing prayer cloths.
I know they are pretty but do not take pictures with them; it is disrespectful. The National Park Service even put signs down so that people will not do that in June, which I think is like prayer month or something (see above for a picture of one of the signs).
Another thing you can do is try to see the aliens (which Grandpa joked about a lot).
________________________________
The following is by Mom, not Ben
On Friday morning my dad texted my mom a message from work that was ultimately perplexing (yet rather uninformative): "really really sick can't drive go to room one hospital. send."
So she went to the hospital, but he wasn't here. When they saw the text she got, they started calling around but couldn't seem to locate him at any nearby hospitals.
Finally he answered my mom's text asking for clarification to tell her more of his symptoms and that he had checked into a hotel room (at the hotel that he works at) so that he could sleep it off, but that he was too sick to even sleep, and that he would really like to go to the hospital.
So my mom went to the hotel to pick him up to take him to the hospital.
His heart rate was off, so they gave him an EKG (because his heart is a going concern), but although his heart rate was off, they didn't seem to think his heart was the problem. So they gave him a CT scan (or CAT scan or something) and found that his gallbladder was severely inflamed and full of kidney stones and that it would have to come out immediately.
Now, my friend Shallee also had an emergency surgery for her gallbladder this weekend. She went in on Saturday and they held her overnight for an emergency surgery the following day. She went home Sunday afternoon.
They didn't wait at all for my dad, just pulled my dad into surgery immediately. Like, "Let's cut this guy open!"
So he had surgery on Friday and has just been in a bad way since then. I was starting to get concerned about sepsis or something because his white blood cell count was elevated and didn't seem to be responding to the antibiotics they had been administering through his IV (his white blood cell count was 19000 on Friday when he was admitted and by Sunday it was only down to 18000 (normal is like 4000 (with anything over 10000 being concerning)).
But today his white blood cell count is "borderline" and he's feeling...better...though he still hasn't managed to keep any food down at all (so that's still an issue).
He has been up for texting and things, though, which he hadn't been all weekend, so I thought it would be a good time to do a 16th anniversary of the red shirt he gifted Rachel when she was a wee baby, shortly before he went in for an emergency triple bypass surgery.
I can't even remember what size it was meant to be, but all of my kids have worn it around age two (anywhere from 12 months to 4 years, honestly).
Here's Phoebe wearing it tonight, with all of her siblings who wore it before her:
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Me and Ben went to Antelope Island with Auntie K because two certain somebodies thought it would be funny to make me and Alex stand on a fake geyser at the playground at the zoo.😒😒
[Mom edit: That was me and Dad. We thought it would be funny to tell Alexander and Zoë to stand on the fake geyser at the splash pad because they were being mopey-dopes. So they did stand on the geyser and it was kind of funny when the geyser went off...but, boy, were they mad!]
Alex couldn’t go in Auntie K’s car, because his car seat was hard to move, so Ben took his place. My car seat was easy to move, because it’s a Mi-Fold, so I went in Auntie K’s car too.
[Mom edit: I'm not sure that this excursion was specifically to make up for getting the kids wet. I think it was more simply because Auntie K wanted to spend more time with those two. Below is a picture of them hanging out of the sunroof of her car after Zoë's baptism (the car was not moving at the time). They're just at the perfect age where they can have a lot of fun (aren't moody teens) and can buckle their own seatbelts and things (aren't toddlers).]
On our last evening in Utah, we went to my parents' house for a little pre-birthday celebration (since my birthday would be happening somewhere in South Dakota). Kelli picked up some cupcakes from a place called The Sweet Tooth Fairy (or something like that, I think). She got an assortment of cupcakes, including some individually-wrapped gluten-free cupcakes for herself.
They were very yummy!
My mom had the brilliant idea to take a group picture at the start of the evening—when everyone was (1) present and accounted for, and (2) relatively happy. My dad has a tendency to get peopled-out and sneak away, but we wanted to make sure he was there for the pictures. And goodbyes can get ugly and weepy. A third benefit was that we wouldn't end up forgetting to take them!
It's possible that my sister Kelline was the most excited person to have our family visit Utah. She must have driven down from Layton a handful of times! She came to Zoë's baptism, she came for "museum day," she came to the Heiss gathering, she drove Benjamin and Zoë back after their post-zoo excursion, she drove down to deliver birthday cupcakes and say goodbye—by my calculations, that's a handful of times! It's at least an hour one way, so that was quite a lot of driving that she did for us, not to mention all the fun things she planned for us to do!
On Monday she ended up having a couple of her grandkids for the day (long story*), so she invited us to visit some of BYU's museums with them. We ended up being late (which is quite the feat considering we were staying only 15–20 minutes away and my sister had to drive an hour), so they already enjoyed the Museum of Peoples and Cultures without us. We met them at the Museum of Paleontology.
Here are pictures of my four youngest kids:
We stayed at Aunt Linda and Uncle Trevor's house in Spanish Fork while we were in Utah. This allowed the kids to get together with their old friends (specifically Rachel, but also—though to a lesser degree—Miriam, Benjamin, and Zoë) and for us to visit our old stomping grounds.
One evening we took the kids on our old "loop" walk, where we looked for goatheads, sunflowers, thistles, and darkling beetles. We really struck out on the plants (though we weren't very sad about missing out on goatheads) but the darkling beetles were out in full force.
Benjamin bravely picked one up:
On June 14th, we planned to have a family gathering outside at the neighborhood park after a brief organ recital at the church. Unfortunately, that day it decided to rain at the exact time we’d planned to have it (it was quite stormy the whole time we were in Utah, which was strange). This complicated our plans. We hadn’t reserved the gym in the church, but we decided we’d try to gather there anyway and leave if anyone else needed it right then, which was unlikely.
While we waited for people to show up, we played duck duck goose, Simon Says, and parachute games with the kids (resulting in only minimal tears!). It took some of them a while to actually understand how Simon Says works; when Ben was it we told him that he had to try to get people out and he gasped and went, “But why would I want to trick them?!” I think all the little cousins had a lot of fun together, though!
We started bright and early; we had a long drive ahead of us, and we wanted to get to Downtown San Antonio before it got too hot, and we had tickets to go in the church at 9:00. The day before, we read about Davy Crockett and the Alamo (the "Who Was" books for them), so we considered ourselves well educated about the subject. We were down in the lobby eating breakfast by 7:30, with the cars already packed. We weren't super worried about it getting too hot, because that morning it was in the 30's, and Dad could see his breath, but by the time we got there, it was the perfect temperature.
It took us a little while to figure out where to park, but we eventually found some parking on the street. Here's Zoë pretending to drive the car while Mom was executing a diaper change (Phoebe got really good at car diaper changes while we were on this trip!).
You can see Dad and Grandpa figuring out how to pay for parking while all this was going on.
Andrew has dubbed this week "Thesis Week"—the week in which I make the final push to finish my manuscript...which is currently sitting at 144 pages. He printed out my thesis so that I could go completely old school and read my words not on the screen. That's a thick pile of paper!
Andrew—of course—went all in on keeping statistics as we made our way across the country and back. He started out keeping copious notes about start and stop times...before he realized that our cell phones track all that information anyway and he could simply harvest that data and analyze it later.
And that's exactly what he did, which is equal parts fascinating and terrifying.
Our phones have information about where we are right down to the millisecond of every day, right down to the latitude and longitude of every footstep. It's...wild...and fascinating.
Anyway, if you want to read about all the statistics of our trip (including about the moment I cut the kids off from (sugary) beverages because we were stopping for potty breaks every half hour) you can read Andrew's blog post here.
That link will skip you right past all the coding tutorials he included at the top (so you don't have to wade through those).
The drive out to the grand canyon was pretty bleak for the last half of the drive the first half we were driving on this mountain road with trees all around us then about an hour on that road we started to descend and suddenly we were in a beautiful mountain meadow with only a couple houses scattered about. (we were on the Indian reservation) and I just thought “this is so peaceful.” With some cows in the distance grazing it was a sight to behold. Then a few moments later we smelled smoke and thought, “What!? Smoke!” Then we realized that it was probably prescribed burning to protect from even bigger fires.
When we got to the canyon we could not go to the visitors center because it was closed so we had to go to this bookstore that was open to get our junior ranger books.
After our Carlsbad adventure, we realized that we would not make it to the hotel in time for dinner. We would make it there around 11:30 pm, and we were still slightly jet-lagged from crossing over time zones, so it would feel like 2:30 am, so we decided to find a McDonalds somewhere. We chose Gallup, NM, as our stopping place.
[Mom edit: That may have been a mistake.]
We had to stop at a gas station in Albuquerque, because Phoebe was being a pill, but while we were there, it started getting really windy. Like really windy. So all of us rushed back to the cars, and tried to get on the freeway as quickly as possible. It started pouring almost right as we got onto the freeway, and the lightning was crazy. We didn't hear any thunder, because the rain was too loud.
Also because it wasn't just rain hitting the car, there was also hail. The hail didn't last very long, but it was very loud. It kept raining for a long time, and only lessened about 30 minutes before Gallup. This was a very big storm that stretched across almost all of New Mexico, and it hit Gallup as well, and so everything was still very wet when we got there.
While Dad and Grandpa were inside getting our food, we were all huddled in our car as it was about 50 degrees outside, and still sort of sprinkling. But we saw a rainbow outside, and had to get out to see it!
Zoë chose to be baptized in Utah so that she could have family members attend, which I think was an excellent decision! It was lovely to have family witness her special day.
I forgot to include any pictures in my last post, so here are a few...
This is Benjamin's back immediately after his shower:
I think I see six or seven stings there, so not too bad. He has 3 or 4 on his stomach. At least three on his left arm. One on one of his fingers. His legs easily have 10 to 15 bites between the two of them—those things were crawling right up his pant legs.
He was a pretty miserable boy.
Considering our neighbour sustained three stings herself and reported that her entire legs felt like they were on fire, I'm pretty sure Benjamin was in a world of pain. He mostly watched television or played video games for the rest of the morning with ice packs tucked here, there, and everywhere.
He was interested in the stories people were sharing on Facebook, so I'll put a couple here:
