House O' Sullivans

The other day, Zeke came up to me in the kitchen, opened his mouth wide and said, "Mom, I think I have a fever in my mouth.  Will you check it?"

When we were in the Sawtooths with our friends, the Spaldings, they showed us a viral You Tube video of a news interview of a woman whose apartment took fire.  In the interview, she mentions that she has bronchitis and that nobody has time for THAT.  My kids have picked up on this phrase. Zeke and I sing together every night while he's laying in his bed, ready to go to sleep.  "I Love to See the Temple" and "Silent Night" are two of his favorites.  A couple of weeks ago, I suggested a song for us to sing together and he replied, "I don't have time for that, mom."  As I listed off possibilities for our nightly singing, he kept repeating, "Mom, I don't have TIME for that."  It makes me LAUGH.

Last week I packed the kids up and took them to Redman Campground, just above Solitude in Big Cottonwood Canyon.  I wanted them to have a full week to run free, explore, and enter a state of nature flow.  Casey and I both spent significant time as kids exploring outdoors without our parents and we both secretly wish that we lived on a big piece of land that backed up to National Forest.  On Monday we set up camp on the northwest loop where we'd spotted a mommy deer and her three babies.  The kids immediately made friends with our camping neighbors, the Pulleys.  When I told them the names of my kids, Kim (the mom) said, "I wanted to name my son Zeke, but my husband wouldn't let me because he only knows DOGS named Zeke."  That was so funny, since that's what CASEY said too, and Zeke IS named after a dog, really.  (My Uncle Danny has a dog named Zeke, which is really where I got the idea.)  I told her that Zeke's real name is Noble.  To which...

It's about time that I told this story.  Wednesday, July 31st we packed up the van and headed for the north-west shores of Lake Tahoe in California.  Carnelian Bay to be exact.  Months in the planning, I'd organized a reunion of sorts with the White side of my family.  Ten years ago, while reunioning at Lake Mary Ronan in Montana, my White cousins and I decided that we would meet up every year somewhere in the country for what we termed a "Maggotfest."  The meetings were an attempt to rectify the fact that we felt jipped because we rarely saw each other as kids and wanted to make up lost time.  (My White cousins are really AWESOME!!) Initially our reunions just involved the cousins, but they've expanded in recent years to include our parents and grand-parents. Cruising west on I-80, we felt the pull of the Salt Flats and stopped to run out on the unearthly landscape. After eight and a half hours of hardcore driving, we pulled up at th...