girl’s retreat

Jul 19, 2013

I am back from ten days away from home and swimming in laundry up to my eyeballs! I got home late last night with Fisher and Annes and then Kez and Blythe arrived home from Girls’ Camp this afternoon. After an early morning physical therapy appointment, I hurried home to start on the piles of laundry and have been sorting through Annesley’s too-small clothes (somehow she has grown some more!) and am hoping to empty my closet of clothing that no longer speaks to my soul. It is one of those days…those work-in-the-house days that I don’t really enjoy, but have to be tackled nonetheless.

Before I bore you to death with anymore laundry and clothing posts…I mean, they bore me to death and I own the stuff, I can’t imagine how painfully boring it is to read about someone else’s clothing issues…here are some pics from our Girls’ Retreat in beautiful Park City. The whole point of this retreat was to fill Tami up with enough love from her stateside friends to get her through the next eight months she has left in Australia. I hope we accomplished that goal! I can’t even imagine how much love I would need to fill my bucket if I was going to be gone from my friends for an extended period of time.

Katherine was our gourmet chef for the week. She brought baskets and boxes and coolers of food and with her magic kitchen skills whipped up three delicious meals for us each day of the week. She is so gifted in the kitchen she was even able to accomodate some new food restrictions Jennifer and I are implementing, but that she had no idea about till the day of (neither did we – we had appointments with Tami’s dad, my favorite chiropractor and he asked us both to stop eating all grains, sugars, starches, and legumes for a few weeks). We had delicious green salads, dips, swiss chard (a first for me, but boy, howdy was it delicious!), kale, yogurt cups she somehow made delicious without any sweeteners, and many, many other delicious entries that made my whole week scrumptious.

More yummy food along with a Heather and Kat squeeze.

I love this picture of Kat…so much joy in that girl! She was in the middle of preparing another delicious meal while I was snapping pictures from my horizontal chair and she wouldn’t stop chopping to pose for us. Finally I made Boo and Jen jump up next to her and she looked up in surprise at just the right moment.

We went to IKEA where I almost passed out, but was already in a wheelchair, so it was all good. I was able to find Blythe some turquoise boxes for her Expedit shelves and some handy-dandy travel bottles for all the children’s shampoos and soaps. I walked rode out of there having spent only $17! That may be an IKEA record!

Tami, Boo, Jen, and Mikelle rented some paddleboards and had races all over the teensy-tiny lake that was across from our condo. You know I would have been right there with them if my hip hadn’t freaked out on Saturday (well, okay, if I could rewind my life 18 months and not have a hip injury or a broken foot, I would have been on those boards!). Instead I stayed in bed and watched Oaklyn so her mama could go play in the water.

Heather, one of Tami’s friends from Colorado, is turning 40 this weekend, so we celebrated it early with Kat’s delicious chocolate cups (which Jen and I couldn’t eat, but Kat made us a substitute dessert that helped us not feel completely left out of the fun), massages, a movie, and eyebrow waxing by the super-talented Mikelle.

The massage table – it was heavenly for everyone else, but it seems my ligaments are too loose for massage now. I ended up with several vertebrae shifted out of place and my whole rib cage torqued, so I guess this was my last massage night until some brilliant scientist invents a ligament-fixer-upper!

Heather loved on Oaklyn all week long. She is the most thoughtful person I have ever met. Over and over and OVER she did nice things for all of us ladies. I could learn a few lessons from her.

Kris, another of Tami’s good friends from Colorado, brought her Turbo Fire DVD’s and did a workout with everyone in the mornings (again, not me, I stayed in bed and snoozed every single day…if I can’t join the fun, I might as well catch up on my ZZZ’s, right?). She has nine children and looks like she is still 22. Here she is holding Oaklyn.

Jen, who always looks adorable in pictures, decided to take her posing skills to the next level and have people hold her up in all sorts of whacky positions.

Finally she decided to rocket-launch herself into the air and lucky for her, I caught a picture of it!

We decided Jen should pick up Tami as well, but Tami was scared petite Jen would drop her, so she couldn’t make herself lift up both legs.

Attempting, but still too scared.

Mikelle taught Boo, who often sports a ponytail, how to curl her hair into ringlets and it turned out fabulouso.

Mikelle spent lots of her time cutting and coloring hair. She is a superstar hair dresser and maybe when she is out of the little children stage of life she will make gazillions of dollars helping people look their best.

I am not photogenic at all…I turn into a blob of mush when a camera is pointed in my direction, but I tried super hard to get a picture with Tami…it took about twenty tries, but we finally ended up with one that I can live with – I still don’t like it, but it will have to do.

Here is one of the laughter-on-the-way-to-mush pics.

I had the hardest time getting a good pic of these three. None of them would look at me and smile at the same time.

This one CRACKS me up. Tami was posed for so long because Boo wouldn’t look at the camera…she was messing around trying to get Jen to laugh and break her perfect pose…that her smile had become a little stale. I hollered at her to smile for real and show some life and this is what I got…that is some life!

We went and had pedicures done and now my calloused Hobbit feet look amazing. The jets in the foot bath about killed my sore foot, but it was worth it to have pretty toes. This picture however is awful. I can’t lean forward because of my hip injury and Boo couldn’t see me in the picture so she kept saying “Lean forward, Trac! More, more!” Finally, I strained my neck as far as I could and she snapped a pic…and now I am immortalized as the woman with the twelve-inch-giraffe-neck. Oh my goodness, it is awful.

We had so, so much fun. It was wonderful to spend three days with my sister and little Oaklyn. Tami, who was more like a sister than a cousin when we were growing up, is buried so deep in my heart that I can’t imagine life without her, is going back to Australia now. I am so grateful I was able to be with her without any distractions and see her face full of happiness for a few short days. I loved meeting Kris and Heather. They are exemplary women and I learned much about living with trials and hardship from them. They both inspired me to live and love more fully. Boo is full of fun and depth and music and can-do attitude. Her friendship has been such a gift to Tami and I am so glad they have each other as besties. Jen and Kat light up my world. The Idaho contingent at the retreat was missing Jessica, but it was still so fun for the three of us to hangout together.

Somehow we never got a picture of all of us together! What were we thinking?!?

Now it is back to reality…laundry, children, unpacking and packing for the next adventure, finalizing my class plans for iFamily this fall, dejunking my bedroom, working on the yard, finding the fox that is eating Fisher’s chickens, loving on the kittens, planning out our homeschool adventure for the coming year, getting gymnastics classes organized, healing my foot, and figuring out what to eat now that Kat isn’t cooking for me three times a day.