Crime Scene Report

Time: sometime between 1:00-3:00 am

Witnesses: none

Motive: unsupervised fun

All that work, and he only ate one piece of candy.

Okay, so here is the story. Saturday night Chico was wired and did not want to go to bed. By midnight I was done and Brent had fallen asleep while he was studying before that.  I went to bed thinking he would just play with toys in his bed. That's what he normally does when he's not ready to sleep and he's supposed to be in bed.

I should mention that Chico watched me pack some gummy bears and starbursts into ziploc baggies before bed for church. I stored them, per his request, inside Mr. Potato Head... a.k.a. "The Egg" in our church bag, then went to bed.

As you can see from the pictures above, after I was asleep, Chico got into the church bag and attempted to open the ziploc bags. He couldn't open them the conventional way, so he got the scissors out of the drawer that he's not supposed to open.  That didn't work out very well for him as you can see above.  So next he resorted to stabbing the bag with a pencil.  That seems to have worked for him because there was one open starburst wrapper sitting there.  All that work, and he only ate one of them!

He loves drawing with Sharpies even though Mommy frowns (deeply frowns) upon it, and he must have gotten a thrill out of drawing with it unsupervised.  We're just counting our lucky stars that it was only on paper and that he used pen instead of Sharpie on Brent's text book.

The overall damage could have been a lot worse. Thankfully it wasn't and we've been laughing about it all day.

Our final hike at Arches

We wanted our last hike of the day to be something a bit harder and something that we hadn't done previously. SO we drove off the main path over to Tower Arch/Marching Men. By then it was getting really hot so we packed as much water as we could and brought the remainder of our food and we set off for this 3.5 mile hike. (By the way, if we hadn't been lugging two kids on this hike it would have been not too hard and we could have done it a lot faster than 3 and a half hours)

This hike had such cool rock formations all along the way.

This hike didn't have a clear trail, instead it had cairns all along the way.  Chico became quite skilled at finding each one.  We have some adorable video of him running from one cairn to the next and pointing out each one to us when we asked him where it was.  He'd get so excited as he found each one and would clap for himself.  It really made the hike go better having him actively looking for things on the trail.  When the cairns got old, he'd look for cactus, when the cactus was gone, he'd look for Lizards. :)

Believe it or not, there is a baby in there. He fell asleep and slumped down.

The man made cairns seemed to model God's beautiful creations in the background.

Our son IS an artist, but no, he did not create this beauty. We found it on the way. :)

This looked like a giant cairn to us.

Evidence (in case there was any doubt) that we were indeed in the desert.

This rock below reminds me of the round stone you always see in pictures of the tomb Christ was buried in.

These next three are cool through that narrow opening of some fallen rocks:

I think it's time to go shoe shopping for Brent.

He wasn't feeling like smiling for Brent.  It really was a sweet picture, even if Chico was not hamming it up the best. :)

It's called Tower Arch because there is a big tall tower formation behind it... which I don't think we got a picture of. :)

Our little mountain climber.

It was such a gorgeous day and gorgeous view!

I love hiking with Brent. He takes me farther than I thought I could go, he takes me to places that I wouldn't have gotten to see. I love being married to someone who loves adventure like I do!
Speaking of adventure, back when we were debating about going to Moab or not with the whole car situation we asked Chico what he wanted to do and he said, "go on a aventure!" 

We got back to our car, tired, hungry, and in need of some magic bandaid power for Chico's cut on his hand. When we approached our car Brent reached in his pockets for the keys and realized he didn't have them. Sure enough, they were in the ignition and all the doors were locked.  Lucky for us, I had unrolled my window a bit to pull Chico's underwear out from airdrying while we drove. Remember how I said his peeing his pants was significant? It turned out to be such a tender mercy!

My arm barely was able to make it with Brent pushing down on the window and I got it unlocked!

All the while, Chico was obliviously playing with his dumptruck, looking absolutely adorable in Brent's hat.

We drove home and the boys slept most the way. We wanted to sleep too but we were able to avoid that and made it home safe and sound. :)

Delicate Arch (Hike Number Two)

It was looking like a storm was rolling in and so we decided to hike Delicate Arch next since we already had fantastic pictures of it from last year so if it rained it wouldn't be a big deal. It blew hard the whole way up which was a really nice way to keep cool. We got to the top and saw the awesomely magnificent Delicate Arch. It was really windy and crowded at the viewing place and Brent convinced me that it wasn't scary to go down by the arch and down into the bowl. I trust my husband and so we went. I held Chico's hand and we walked down to the arch and touched it.  Then we impressed a bunch of people by walking past the arch and down the side and then into the bowl. We ate lunch and I fed Nelmo and we ran around in the bowl and took a bunch of pictures and just had a grand old time all by ourselves down in the arch.

I love these next pictures SO much. I'm going to have to frame them or something.

It was really peaceful down there, away from the wind and all the people.

He's so close to crawling... he gets stuck and then screams. I can't wait until he figures out how to get himself unstuck. :)

Notice in the picture above that Chico peed his pants. This will become significant later on when i post about hike number three.

It's amazing how uncomfortable it is to have a sleeping baby in a pack. Both boys slept most of the way down.  We each had a pack. Chico was on Brent's back and Nelmo was on my back.  Chico is getting so big that it's pretty comical to see him asleep on Brent's back. Everyone laughed as we walked past. I should have gotten a picture, dang.