A Handful of Hancocks

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Vacay to Utah Part 2

7/3—Chad and Julie got to town which always means one thing: eating at Costa Vida or Cafe Rio. YUM!

Ella with Grandpa.

Ella with Grandma.

Luke, Noah, Jason, Darrin and Uncle Terry went to buy fireworks. They were given a budget, but I’m not sure they stuck to it…

Some of the cousins are very into fireworks. Luckily, my kids are pretty hesitant about them.

The boys doing their daytime fireworks.

The supervisor.

Parachutes off the porch.

She loved catching the parachutes with the boys!

Dinner time!! The girl table.

And the boy table.

As it started to get dark, the kids busted out more fireworks.

Tank battle.

Aunt Kristin was there too, and we liked experimenting with the settings on our cameras while the fireworks were going off!

Sparklers!

These guys took a turn to watch while the big boys (aka Darrin and Terry) lit some bigger fireworks.

There was one scary incident which caused all the kids to then hide in the window wells from fireworks that might misfire.

7/4—4th of July!

Several months ago I signed Andrew, Josh and myself up for the Tooele 5k. We started training about a month before.

The morning of the race we woke up nice and early, ate a little something, and then headed to the start of the race.

Aunt Kristin and Uncle Chad ran it with us.

Andrew and I at the starting line.

When race started Josh and I were running together, but it didn’t take him long to ask if he could just run ahead. He’s obviously much faster than me!

Aunt Kristin and Andrew ran together. I was proud of Andrew and how well he did! Based on the training we did, I wouldn’t have predicted that :)

Results:

Josh--23:56 minutes, 69th overall, 9/22 in age group (9 to 13)

Kim—27:08 minutes, 117th overall, 16/34 in age group (30 to 39)

Andrew—30:09 minutes, 147th overall, 19/22 in age group (9 to 13)

Josh ran by the photographer (Darrin) so fast and sooner than Darrin anticipated so he didn’t get a picture of him running by. So here’s his after picture!

After the race we found the rest of the fam watching the parade.

Little Josh and Ella became pals and played with each other while everyone else took naps and prepared our 4th of July picnic.

Andrew loves his big cousins.

It ended up raining quite a bit that afternoon. The family soccer game was in the rain. It started to thunder and lighting so they had to quit. But everyone had fun while it lasted! I took pictures from the van lol.

The rain let up just before the fireworks so we headed to Grantsville to watch them. They were great as always except for the fact that Ella screamed through half of the show. I felt bad for everyone sitting around us.

7/5—We went to church with Terry and Pauline. Elijah was made an Elder so it was neat to be there for that.

After church we ate dinner with Grandma and Grandpa, Terry and Pauline’s family as well as Dave and Libby’s family. Aunt Kristin came out also. It so nice to be able to see family members we don’t see very often.

This is Ella sitting in a little rocking chair that used to be Grandma Hancock’s. It sounds like it was broken, and Uncle Dave fixed it.

The kids were having a great time together and got the idea to take a selfie with all 7 of them. It was challenge, but I think they got everyone in! They were laughing so hard, and it made my heart happy to watch them interact with each other!

We headed home the next day. We made the drive in one day and all but Darrin survived. lol.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Vacay to Utah Part 1 by Josh

Sorry for the long blog hiatus. I’m just not feelin’ the magic. And it’s especially hard to find when you’re months and months behind. So in an attempt to catch up, I’ve employed the masses to help write about our vacation. Part of this is written by Josh. Enjoy!

6/30 Our vacation to Utah was very fun. We had an awesome time there. Our Grandpa had a really cool water slide, and we played on that for a while. It was awesome.

As you can see, I am awesome.

Again, awesome :) We tried a bunch of different techniques and had competitions.

After we were done playing in the water, we went to an old, dirty theater to watch Inside Out. We all really liked the movie.

For my Aunt Kristin’s birthday we when to this place called Texas Roadhouse. Luke calls it Texas Outhouse. Uncle Nathan and Aunt Amanda came too.

Talk about a creepy photo bomb.

After that we went to a park and played bocce ball.

7/1 Like we always do, we went to Lagoon, but this year it was a little different. Instead of our cousins coming, our friends Brad and Angela came with us. Brad said he could handle any of the rides there, but he got sick on the Samurai.

end of Josh’s summary and start of mom’s ____________________________________

It was so good to see great friends. You know the kind you only see every couple years and things never get awkward or weird? Brad and Angela are those kind of friends.

It was so hot that day, so we went to Lagoon-a-beach first thing.

After swimming and sliding on several water slides, we ate lunch and rode rides for the rest of the day! Kenzie and Luke were not quite brave enough to spend all their time with the big kids and were too big for the little kids. Luckily they were good sports and rode lots of ride with Avery and Ella.

And the little girls were brave and rode some big kid rides like the Red Dragon and Bombora.

By the afternoon, these girls were besties. So so cute. Definitely future college roommates :)

Cooling off with a cold drink!

Such a fun day! So grateful for good friends!

7/2—Playing games with cousins!

Elijah taught Andrew how to play the real game of Pokémon. And Andrew wants it known that he beat Elijah.

The kids played an epic game of UNO attack with grandpa.

Later that night we went up in the canyon to have a fire and roast hot dogs. It was a beautiful night except for the crazy number of flies up there. I felt like I was sitting in an outhouse eating my dinner.