Savannah spent most of the week in the hospital.  They kept her mostly complaint-free with pain meds and lots of anti-nausea medicine.  The first couple of days were pretty rough because of nausea but once they got that under control, she improved.  Finally, she just got bored and tired of the same four walls and was ready to COME HOME!  We were all ready for her to come home, too.  We all missed her and felt the big hole in our family.  I felt run-ragged with the driving back and forth to the hospital.  When I was home I felt like I should be at the hospital and when I was at the hospital I felt like I should be home . . .  On Thursday, she was finally cleared to leave.  Yay! 

She's been doing well at home although she tires easily and still has to stay on top of the pain.  She is doing great, though!

Sarah was busy this week with work.  She worked everyday Monday through Thursday.  She had to miss a lot of open courts for tennis so she tried to play when she could.  On Tuesday she got a new perm and on Monday she painted her room a bright green!  Both her hair and her room are adorable.  The only reason she didn't work Friday and Saturday was because she requested those days off for Youth Conference!  So, she was busy again but this time with friends and fun at a cabin up Spanish Fork Canyon.  (I got to go, too!)  She had a busy week and I'm impressed with all she got done.

Megan attended those open courts and has been really enjoying the chances she gets to play tennis.  She did a lot of babysitting for me this week as Tuesday was Kevin and my anniversary and I kept going back and forth to the hospital on the other days.  She's a good sport.  She is also doing an online health class to free up some time in her schedule next year and she has been good at keeping herself working on it even though it is not fun to write essays in the summer!  (As she assures me often!) She enjoyed Youth Conference, too!

Mariah has been great with the kids this week, too.  She even took a bunch of hers and Cali and Chey's friends to the creek and engineered a terrific time with rafts and all.  She is a really great leader.  Kevin has found a private coach to work with Mariah on basketball now and then and they met with him again this week for a workout.  She is doing great.  She also went with us to Youth Conference Fri-Sat and had a great time!

The only picture I took!

Chey and Cali were good sports as I was gone a lot this week.  They have lots of friends in the area and stay busy playing with them.  A lot of times they include Bethany and that is super nice, too.  When they're on their own, they read and play on the computer with Webkinz.  They also still spend a lot of time with the bunnies.    They got to go to a birthday party at the Springville pool on Wednesday afternoon and they had tons of fun there!  They were pretty sore the next day from all that getting in and out of the pool!

Bethany and Benjamin play a lot together with huge masses of children from the neighborhood.  (Okay, maybe not "huge masses," but sometimes it can get to be a big group!)  Bethany is good at including Benjamin.  It is especially easy when Beth's friends have younger brothers or sisters Ben's age.  Ben doesn't really mind if it is a girl or boy.  He got right in the thick of things when they were playing dress-up this week.  Of course, it helps that we have some boy things, too!

I registered Cali and Chey and Bethany for school this week -- at two different schools!  Cali and Cheyenne will have Miss Roach for 5th grade -- a teacher who has taught almost all their older sisters.  They are excited!  Bethany will be my first little one to go to Elementary school somewhere other than Brookside.  We're enrolling her in Sage Creek (also very close) to take advantage of their Chinese immersion program.  I think it will be great for her.  But it is also very weird for me.  I feel so out of place and so disloyal to Brookside!

As I mentioned above, Tuesday was Kevin and my anniversary.  20 years!  We wanted to do something memorable and kind of epic for our 20 year anniversary so we had planned to hike Timpanogos which is the third (?) highest peak in Utah, super close to us, and a beautiful hike we had never done.  I should mention that we almost always have blue-skies during Utah summers.  Rain is very infrequent.  All our green-ness is fed from the mountains which store the snow from the winter and gets released to us gradually all summer as the snow melts.  It is a pretty awesome deal.  So . . . imagine our dismay when Tuesday was rainy!!  Timp was shrouded in clouds all day. 

See Timp?  Ya, you can't.  It's behind all those clouds.

Kevin promises to take me sometime soon but we had to make new plans.  Since I really wanted to do something we had never done before, we decided to try our neighborhood indoor rock-climbing gym!  It was pretty fun.  Who knew that I could carry Kevin on a rope?  We had a great day. 

The best thing about our anniversary was that Kevin surprised me by making me a DVD full of pictures and music from the years throughout our marriage.  It was so fun and tender and nostalgic!  He said it took him a long time and he worked on it a lot while I was gone to girls camp for a week!  What a lucky girl am I!  I love that man and all the 20 years we've had together!  Here's to 20 more! (and more and more and more!)