We're home

It seems unreal to be home. It seems unreal that we were in Italy just a couple days ago and in Bulgaria a couple weeks ago. Part of the unreal-ness is probably due to the fog of jet lag. But part of it is that it's just plain amazing that we've been able to go on this trip. It was a dream come true. And it was a TON of work. And everything at home looks and feels a little different now.

I was trying to focus on really being in the moment on this trip and that combined with how jam-packed each day was with adventures put this blog on the back burner.  Instagram proved to be the best way to capture highlights of the trip w/o intruding too much on the trip itself. It's tricky finding a balance between enjoying what you're doing and processing what you're doing so you can savor it on another level and capturing what you're doing so that you can enjoy the memories.

This trip was a LOT of work. I feel like I could really use a vacation after this trip. Trips and vacations aren't the same thing, are they? It was hard packing and unpacking and not leaving anything behind (I have to pat us all on the back for not leaving anything behind anywhere we stayed!). It was hard finding food and water for everyone in a timely way (there were a few pretty hungry moments when grocery stores and restaurants were closed or when we wound up far from food when it was well past time to eat). There were lots of times when someone needed to go to the bathroom somewhat desperately with no bathrooms particularly handy. There were surprises - pleasant ones like a rainbow or an amazing street performer or a super delicious meal at a good price right when we needed it - and unpleasant ones like lots of rain making us wet and cold when the forcast showed no rain, one of the places we stayed turning out to be sort of scary, getting stuck in an elevator, and finding that some routes we took were a lot longer than we'd anticipated. There were times when we got on each other's nerves (being together 24/7 was wonderful most of the time but sometimes that much togetherness and bathroom and space-sharing was hard).

But every bit of work was repayed in abundance. We bonded over the beautiful and crazy things we experienced together. We learned so much about history and art and cultural differences and human nature. We shared big parts of our personal histories as Jared and I shared Italy and Bulgaria with our kids. We felt great compassion together for the orphans we met and learned so much about how important parents are. We realized how tough and adaptable our children are as they walked and walked and walked and literally never complained. We realized what a good team we make as we figured out so much together during our travels. We saw our children wonder and learn and grow by leaps and bounds. We ate fabulous things (amazing produce, great bakery treats, excellent bread and cheese, great pizza, heavenly gelatto). We saw such an abundance of beauty - both God-made and man-made.

Anyway, here are some stats on the trip that Ashton helped me compile on the plane home:

• 18 days
• 267,629 steps covering 81.25 miles (and the twins did about twice that since they climb over everything and run ahead and back to us - amazing amounts of energy!)
• 6 orphanages visited
• one computer donated to an orphanage in need
• 51 books donated to two different orphanages
• 1 training completed for orphanage workers
• 1 new reading program set up at an orphanage
• 115 little gifts handed out to orphans
• 8 new Facebook friends - orphans we met and really connected with and want to stay connected to
• 30 churches visited
• 8 places we stayed/times we unpacked and packed
• 0 times we left anything anywhere (other than a mostly-used thing of shampoo)
• 9 times we ate gelatto
• 8 times we ate pizza
• 12+ times we ate crusty bread and cheese and whole cucumbers and carrots for a meal
• 2 times we got really hungry because we couldn't find any food
• 93 tunnels we drove through
• 36 hill towns we drove past on the freeway
• 1243 photos taken (just by me - we're in the 2000's if we count everyone's photos)

And if you want a representative sampling of 150 of those 2000+ photos we took, click below to see our best shots that we shared on Instagram:

#looslieuropeanadventure on Instagram

Sunday at the Temple and Spiral Jetty

Sunday was a really really special day.

First, we got to go to the dedication of the gorgeous newly refurbished Ogden Temple and be right on the temple grounds for that lovely event. I'm seriously so excited to have a temple in walking distance from our house! I was 8 hours from a temple when I lived in Boston for 10 years off and on (the nearest temple was DC - and then they built a temple right outside Boston after I moved away). We were one to three hours (depending on the crazy traffic) from the Oakland Temple when we lived in the Bay Area. We were 20 minutes from a temple when we lived in St George (but with 5 preschoolers, it was a bit of a challenge to get to the temple as often as we'd have liked). Then we've had a closed temple right down the street most of the time we've lived in Ogden and haven't made it to the Bountiful Temple all that much. But now - wow - we've got a temple just a few blocks away and we're excited and determined to get there very regularly!

After the dedication, we took advantage of the super rare and wonderful fact that Jared didn't have bishop's duties and we went out to visit the otherworldly splendor of the Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake with some of our good friends.

Here's a little info from Wikipedia about the Spiral Jetty:

Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in April 1970 that is considered to be the central work of American sculptor Robert Smithson. Smithson documented the construction of the sculpture in a 32-minute color film also titled Spiral Jetty.

Built on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah entirely of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks and water,Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake. The water level of the lake varies with precipitation in the mountains surrounding the area, revealing the jetty in times of drought and submerging it during times of normal precipitation.

Smithson reportedly chose the Rozel Point site based on the red color of the water and its connection with the primordial sea. The red hue of the water is due to the presence of salt-tolerant bacteria and algae that thrive in the extreme 27 percent salinity of the lake's north arm, which was isolated from fresh water sources by the building of a causeway by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1959.

Smithson was reportedly attracted to the Rozel Point site because of the stark anti-pastoral beauty and industrial remnants from nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, as well as an old pier and a few unused oil rigs.

We went to visit the Jetty three years ago when it looked like this (you can just make out the outline). Of course, the kids had to follow the spiral to its center and everyone ended up pretty wet and cold but had a great time.

It was fun to go this time and see the whole jetty high and dry (that's just sand and salt out there around the jetty even though it looks like water - the water starts way out beyond the jetty).

Here's our afternoon in pictures (it was raining on the way there and looked threatening all day but it actually turned out to be the most perfect cloudy day and didn't rain on us one bit!)

We made a quick stop for bathrooms and a peak at the cool reproduction engines at the Golden Spike Historic Site where the train tracks joined together to connect the entire United States by rail:

Then we took a dirt road from there for about a half hour to the Great Salt Lake.

First we got to the skeletal remains of an old jetty for shrimping boats:

Then, just a bit further down the road, we arrived at our destination - Robert Smithson's famous crazy art installation - the Spiral Jetty:

The kids headed out to follow the jetty to the center:

And on the way they found an awesome snake:

What a creative mind Smithson had!

Here's what the ground looks like out there - salt crystal-crusted - so interesting:

The middle of the jetty!

Then we set out across the salt and sand beyond the jetty to get to the water and played and wondered in the white and pink of it all, bathed in a surreal light. It seriously feels like you're on another planet.

The salt crystals were so interesting:

 

 See how pink the water is out there?

There were some old metal spikes sticking up and the salt had stuck to them in layers for years - this is what resulted:

Jared was nice enough to give me a ride over the super-sharp salt crystals since I didn't bring the right shoes.

And Isaac was an awesome big brother and gave Liza a lift.

 

A couple final shots of the beauty:

And we found this cool old rusty thing to jump over (Thanks to my friend Emily for bringing her great camera and taking these great shots! Plus she planned the excursion. Emily is always planning fun things and we so appreciate it!)

  

And I'll close with a few more great shots by Emily:

First Week of Summer Break - and Instagram Info

I'm realizing that Instagram is a great way to record our family's daily adventures this summer. I can do it right in the moment and I don't have to find a good-sized chunk of time to compose and upload pictures like I do with this blog. I'll still be posting here about once a week when I have something to record and share that goes beyond some fun pictures and thoughts. But if you'd like to keep up with the non-particularly-thought-provoking goings on of our family this summer, feel free to follow us on Instagram.

You can check out all my Instagram posts by clicking here anytime:
http://instagram.com/sarenloosli/
When you get to that page, click on any picture you want to know more about and the description will come up along with a larger photo.

Or you can follow me on Instagram - if you've got Instagram on your phone, just go into "Explore" (it's the icon that looks like a star or a compass or something like that) and click on the search icon at the top (looks like a magnifying glass) and type in "sarenloosli" then you can find me and follow me.

I've got lots of pictures there of our first action-packed week out of school. We got into our summer routines, did a major clean-out of kids' bedrooms as part of moving the twins into the same room together and the big boys into a shared room (for years, we've had Silas and Isaac in one room and Oliver and Ashton in another and everyone was ready for a change), helped out with a lot of random little and big ward needs, went on a beautiful hike, got all the kids' school projects stored in digital photos or tucked away in binders, went to a water park, researched, bought and built a beautiful new pergola plus a new outdoor table for the backyard (we love a good family project and these kids are really helpful these days!), and enjoyed a fabulous neighborhood party (plus had 1/2 the neighborhood in our backyard for a good part of almost every day - so grateful for wonderful neighbors).

Plus I had a chance to conduct a training for our Power of Moms trainers on Saturday and enjoyed a lovely few hours with some great ladies who'll be putting on some really meaningful trainings this year. And since I had to be in SLC first thing Saturday morning for that training and we were there Friday night for the water park, I stayed overnight with my mom and we had a great slumber party - talked and laughed until almost 2am. I sure love my mom.

And sure, there were some hard times and bumps as we adjusted to our new schedule and dealt with lots of unexpected stuff. Plus I'm way behind on Power of Moms work. But life is good.

Here's a glimpse of some of that from the collage Instagram made for me:

Go to http://instagram.com/sarenloosli/ to make the photos above clickable . . .

Southern CA for a Wedding and a New Baby

We spent a lot of Memorial Day weekend driving. And it was actually very pleasant. The kids read a lot (the twins can't put down Harry Potter and Percy Jackson these days and Eliza and Isaac had great books to read as well). Ashton worked on a couple really wonderful videos about the Southern Utah Science trip he just returned from. I edited the curriculum for our new Year III Learning Circles manual. Jared listened to podcasts. Plus we had plenty of time to talk about summer plans. Plus we played the alphabet game and found licsence plates from all over the country. Plus we listened together to two audio books (The Cay and The Maze Runner- didn't finish that one but got a lot of the way through it). Everyone was nice to each other. No one complained. Wow. We've really got this road trip thing down!

The trip was to southern CA where we had great times with both sides of our family. We attended Jared's neice Rachel's beautiful wedding and had a great time with a large portion of Jared's very large family playing on the beach and having a fun game night after the wedding. And we got to stay with my brother Noah and sister-in-law Kristi and their wonderful kids and meet their newest addtion - miracle baby Shelby who was born with a very rare and very serious heart condition and they were geared up for the worst but thanks to excellent doctors, innovative proceedures, and lots of faith and fasting and prayers, little Shelby Grace is doing remarkably well and is home and happy with her family.

Here are some of my favorite moments from the weekend - in photos and in words:

Rachel's wedding was absolutely beautiful - the setting, the ceremony, the bride, everything.

Rachel and Andrew seem like a wonderful match and it was so great to be with them and so many loved ones for this very special day.

Here's Jared's mom and 7 of her 9 children (sadly Joel and Jayne couldn't make it)

And here's the family with spouses included:

I'm so blessed to be part of the ownderful Loosli family.

After a lovely luncheon, we met up at the beach for a chilly but gorgeous afternoon.

The twins ran right into the water - 62 degrees seems like great beach weather to them.

Ashton, Isaac and Eliza joined their uncles and some cousins for a good volleyball game.

Here's the cheering section:

I went for a walk up and down the beach with the twins, checking out kelp and seashells. There's so much wonder at the beach.

And I played in the waves with my boys, running back and forth, following the receeding waves down and then running like crazy to see if we could keep the new wave from touching us. I loved running and laughing together and enjoying the ocean - the feel of the wet sand under our feet, the sound of the waves, the cool surprise of the water slapping your legs - it never gets old for me.

Then we grabbed burgers at good old In and Out and stayed up late playing Pounce and chatting at Bruce and Connie's house. Games with Looslis are aways a really great time.

On Sunday, we had a great day with Noah and family plus my sister Charity who came down from the Bay area for the weekend. We went on a nice long walk all over their lovely neighborhood and the kids played and played and played.

The most important part of our time with Noah and Kristi was meeting their new baby, Shelby Grace, who came into the world with a heart that wasn't really functional but who is doing miraculously well thanks to lots of faith and prayers and great innovative ideas from smart and devoted doctors. It was wonderful to meet her and hold her after we've all been fasting and praying for her for so long!

We got to see how she takes her special heart medicine. But other than medicine and the likelihood of further proceedures down the road, she's a normal, beautiful little baby.

And we had big-time fun with cousins. My kids can't get enough of these fun little cousins of theirs.

I got to hang out and have great talks with some of my favorite people - Noah and Charity

And Kristi

Noah and Kristi have always been some of my biggest heroes (along with all my great family members on both sides of our family). Their stalwart faith and peaceful attitudes and solid hope and love have been beautiful things to watch through this whole crazy process with sweet Shelby.

Isaac taught Shelby a bit about Instagram:

Ashton and Bennet had big time fun together:

And Eliza and Lyla can never get enough of each other:

These three muskateers are SO cute together, coming up with all sorts of imaginative games and ideas, playing with Pokemon cards and making up Pokemon plays to act out, and spending a reasonable amout of time on the Wii.

Goodbye! (Bennett had to run after our car a for a bit, trying to give Ashton one last high five...)