A Quick Family Va-Cay to Provo

Sometimes I have a tendency on this blog to make every family vacation and experience seem perfect and super smooth as if nothing ever goes wrong at our house.  That's for a couple of reasons.  1) I don't generally take pictures of the sad/bad/disastrous family moments and 2) When I get to the end of this road of Motherhood, I don't want to remember the naughties and the fails I want to have rose colored memories of my precious angels.

But this particular family vacation deserves a little honesty, because really it was a pretty difficult vacation.  First of all, this little get away was completely unplanned.  We had an awesome neighbor call and offer three of his season tickets to a BYU game.  He knew that our family bleeds blue and would make good use of the tickets since he couldn't go.  Of course we wanted the tickets, but trying to decide which 3 of us got to go was not going to be easy.  We decided spur of the moment to just buy tickets for the whole family.  We knew that it might be a little struggle with Whitlee and Bronson, but didn't want to ask for our parents to help babysit them overnight as it was so last minute and we knew that they would be helping us out like crazy when Zac and I went on a vacation in a couple of weeks to Washington DC, so we decided to just take everyone.

And we did have some fun!  We went a day early and stayed in a Hotel, which is ALWAYS a win with our kids.  We spent hours exploring the huge Cabellas in Sandy, which was better than any museum and then we swam in the hotel and ate out.  Fun!

The next day we got up early and checked out and headed to Provo.  We got there a couple of hours early walked around the bookstore and prepared for the game, getting the littles their own BYU shirts.  By the time we got out of the Bookstore, it was 97 degrees!  It was so blasted hot!!  We then headed to the stadium and got their nice and early to find our seats.

Zac was so incredibly sweet and let me, Tanner, and Ian have the season tickets from our neighbor and he headed up with the littles and Ashlyn to their end of the bleachers.

Tanner, Ian, and I had "seats" which were smooshed in the middle of a huge crowd.  When they designed these seats, they must have designed them for 5 year old children because it was so squished and the seats were SO hot!  97 degrees, no cloud cover, and absolutely no breeze.  The plastic stadium seats were melting into our backs.  I have never sweated so much in my life.  The gentleman sitting next to me was a bit portly and his legs took up half the leg room of my already tiny seat.  If we needed to get up to go get a drink or go to the bathroom, you had to make everyone on the bench stand to let you through because there really was NO room to squish past anyone.  As you went past each person, you basically had to hug them body on body... it was that tight.  So anyone who needed to leave their seats for any reason during the game got lots of frowns from everyone.  Therefore my bottomless Diet Coke that I bought was a bad idea.  I thought I was going to get a bladder infection.

Bronson, Whitlee, and Charlotte had had enough of the heat roughly 10 minutes into the game and couldn't take it anymore and had to be taken under the bleachers.  Zac finally called me at half time to ask what the score was at which point I realized he hadn't seen any of the game.  I was starting to feel like I was going to get heat stroke during the third quarter, and BYU had a healthy lead, so we decided to head out early to ease the kids suffering and head on home.  Tanner and Ian were a little bummed to not finish the game, but were incredibly good sports and maybe just a bit relieved because they were sweating buckets.

At least Zac got a few pictures while the kids lasted.  You can see how hot they all looked and Zac was wearing two shirts!

It may not have been perfect, but it will definitely be a memory.  And even just the time we had being together in the suburban driving, talking, laughing, and reading together was worth the whole thing.  Oh, and BYU did beat Portland State 20-6... which may be the only game they win this season, so glad we could be there for that!