As a legislative-session-ending celebration we decided to take the kids for the weekend down to Zion National Park, a place--and this is something for which, as a Utahn, I'm now embarrassed--to which we've never been before. All our family is in south-eastern Utah. Clearly, and we've been missing out.
We stayed at (and I'd recommend) the Zion Mountain Resort, in a fun little cabin.
It was a great place to stay, with a buffalo herd right there for the boys to yell at. In fact, there's a restaurant right there that serves mainly their buffalo (to people). We never ate there but I presume you can just step out back and pick the beast you want, just like a lobster in a fancy restaurant.
We were minutes away from some amazing scenery.
A lot of the hikes took us under waterfalls, which the boys loved.
We ended up doing a lot of hiking, in fact, and a lot of getting dirty.
My favorite was seeing how the water cuts through the sandstone there, beautiful.
Finally, we decided to take the long way home and stop at another place we've never been, Bryce Canyon:
And I thought Zion was beautiful. We actually hiked down through that amazing sandstone maze.
Along the way, we lost a son, apparently to exhaustion.
No worries, though. He rose up again, and we love our zombie child.
I'll end with a couple gems of insight on biology from our long talks on our hikes:
Our boys have seen their ultrasounds and some show their tails, which we all have at some point but are eventually reabsorbed. Brian brought up that topic and we started talking about the fact that some people are born with a hint of the now-unneeded appendage still dangling. I told him that I bet a lot of parents have the tails removed. Alan thought a while and told us "If my baby had a tail I'd leave it on. He could bug his brother with it."
Then on another hike he told us "The heart isn't round. It has parts, and one squeezes, and then the other squeezes. And it doesn't look like a heart, it looks like... umm.. a toilet seat." I'm glad he was paying attention at the movie we saw last week at the planetarium, but I doubt they used that analogy :-).
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That's some amazing scenery right there! Although there are many things I dislike about Utah, the scenery isn't one of them. We don't have anything remotely that good here in TX... except maybe Big Bend.
Wow. just, Wow.
The more mud, the more fun (up to a point). The boys look like they are having an absolutely wonderful time. Which I'm sure helped the dads have a wonderful time, too.
I'm charmed by the way your boys think about these biological things. I've never thought of a toilet seat when looking at the shape of a human heart. He's got the squeezie parts down pretty well, though. He'll go far.
That's one adorable family!
(I like Zion's and Bryce, too. Amazing scenery.)
I'd like to see that toilet seat.
Tails? That would be awesome.
Your boys are getting so big. It's so fun to see them growing up. I can't believe they were so small just a little under a year ago.
Vanson: Without the scenery, how does one put up with the politics? :-) I take it TX is very much like UT in that regard.
Java: “The boys look like they are having an absolutely wonderful time. Which I'm sure helped the dads have a wonderful time, too.”
Oh we all did; though I don’t want to pose that such trips are all fun and games. As you, as a mom, know :-), what I don’t have pictures of are their faces during those long car rides: the raucous laughter when they’re teasing each other; the whining once one goes too far over the imaginary line between them; the repeated questioning of if we are there, and yet. Thank goodness someone invented coloring books and eye-spy to help families make it to national parks!
Elbow “ I can't believe they were so small just a little under a year ago.”
Oy, I watch it every day and still can’t believe it.
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