Park City

We spent the last week in Park City with my parents and my sister and her kids. (By "we" I mean me and the kids--Dan spent the week in Massachusetts at Williams College learning about how to teach forensic chemistry. Now he knows all sorts of useful things like, how drug tests work, how to figure out where the bullet comes from, how to type blood--the sort of basic stock techniques for any good CSI-type show).

Now, most people associate Park City with cool things like the Winter Olympics and the Sundance Film Festival. Our annual treks to Park City don't look much like that, for one because my parents don't like to go out to eat, so my mom routinely packs enough food for two or three weeks (even though we're only going to be there for one--and there *are* grocery stores in Park City, even if they are a little more expensive than shopping in bulk at Costco).

We also don't frequent trendy boutiques--although we do visit the outlet mall quite a bit. (The store clerk at Gymboree even recognized my mom! To be fair, she'd just transferred from the Provo store.) One one outing to the mall, I ran into two girls I knew from high school (although they were in Jared's class) *and* the clerk who checked us out was from Hungary. It's been a long time since I spoke with a "rendes Magyar." I wish my Hungarian were better than it is--she told me that my accent was good (but I doubt that she has a very large pool of Hungarian-speaking Americans to compare with!).

Mostly, we spend our days hanging out in the hotel suite, playing games with the kids (or letting the kids watch a movie while Jeni and I tried to write--which happened a couple of times. Apparently writing is infectious--who knew?). We also went swimming with the kids--although the first few days in Park City were hardly promising, since the high temps were in the 50s and low 60s. It did finally warm up, which was a good thing since Andrew could hardly stand waiting.

We even went down the Alpine slide with the kids. Jacob got to go on his own, since he was the only kid who was tall enough (and we didn't have quite enough grown-ups to accompany all the kids). I think he enjoyed it--but he went so slowly that he had three sleds backed up behind him when he reached the bottom. Evelyn reportedly loved it (she went down with my mom)--saying "woo hoo! woo hoo!" all the way down the side of the mountain.

Dan got back late Friday night and joined us in PC--we came back yesterday, stopping by Sarah's house to say hi.

All things considered, it's been a good week.

We have some "Evelyn-isms" to reward those of you who've waded this far:

At Park City, grandpa was helping her find her shoes. She said, "you find them in there, and I'll find them in here."

Today on the way home from church, Andrew ran into her and bonked her knee. A little while later, she told me "I'm tired. My knee is tired. And my hurt knee is tired."

Finally, tonight at bedtime, she ran to the bathroom telling her dad to "make her toothbrush appear."