happy birthday/black island farms

Kyle's birthday was the week after we got home.

He and Bosten went to Red Robin for a lunch date.

We went to Black Island Farms for our yearly fun and to celebrate Kyle's birthday.

We had a great time! The weather was perfect and we stayed way longer than we'd planned on. Then, we rushed home for cake.

harper's story...part 6

We happened to be in Oklahoma the week of the big rivalry game between Oklahoma and Texas. It was crazy (way crazier than any of the rivalries we've been around). We figured we might as well join in the fun.

We went bowling.

We decided to pack up and move to Tulsa (about 3 hours away) so that we'd be there and ready for fingerprints first thing on Monday morning.

We checked out the Tulsa zoo.  It was freezing cold that day, so we didn't stay as long as we might have otherwise...it was still fun, though.

We waited a few days after fingerprints before Oklahoma finally gave us the green light to go home. Utah was pretty quick, and once we got the official go, we headed straight for the airport.

We were delayed getting out of Tulsa, and had enough time to get off the plane and walk to our new gate before boarding in Denver.  Otherwise, it was an uneventful trip.

We were so glad to be home, and everyone was pretty exhausted. Our fun friends had decorated the front of our house. I'm sad I didn't get a picture of it....it was windy during the night, and the next morning it was trashed.

harper's story/vacation...part 5

Thursday we checked out Oklahoma City. 

Our first stop was Pops, on Route 66.

There were a million different choices of soda...we each picked one, and then over the course of the next few days, tried them all.

We got Zombie Brains, Bug Guts, Strawberry, Peach, Root beer and Bacon.  They were all pretty good, except for the Bacon. It was completely nasty and about made the boys throw up.

Next, we went to the National Cowboy Museum.  It was a little boring and a little fun, according to the boys.

We took a water taxi ride on the canal along Bricktown.

We went to a Military Museum. 

You can imagine how much the boys loved it.

It was actually pretty cool.

After dinner at Olive Garden, we called it a day.

We got an email later that night about a couple of issues that had come up with the ICPC paperwork.  Most of it was easily addressed, but they were asking for FBI background checks.

We didn't have those.  Utah requires a background check (which we'd done), but not an FBI fingerprint/background check.  We were on the phone all day on Friday trying to figure out what/how we were going to get it fixed...we talked to the state of Oklahoma and the state of Utah, the Arizona attorney, the Oklahoma attorney, LDSFS, our LDSFS caseworker, etc. It was stressful! 

We took the kids to a movie, but between Kyle and I both we probably saw half of it. The phone kept buzzing and someone would jump up and run out to see what the latest was.  By the end of the day on Friday, we'd figured out that we would do an expedited background check first thing on Monday morning. We had appointments for 9am to get fingerprints done.  Until then, we had to wait...

harper's story/vacation...part 4

We took some homework with us, so every morning before we did anything else we did some school work. 

Then, we'd go out and find something fun to do for a few hours.
Now we were on vacation, and waiting for ICPC to clear.

The first day in Norman we had to go to the University of Oklahoma and check out campus.
Kyle and I loved it. The boys thought it was a lot of walking.
It was a gorgeous campus. 

The football stadium was right in the middle of the campus. It was even open, so we got to go in and look around.  It was huge! I would love to go to a game there...but not sit up in the top of the stands (it was waaay up there). 

We decided we could be Oklahoma fans too.

We checked out the bookstore and got some new Sooners gear.

We'd heard the Natural History museum was fun on campus, so we checked that out too.