Introducing Ella!

In addition to rearranging bedrooms, the other thing we had talked about doing after Kendra left for school was allowing Camille to finally get a pet chinchilla.  She'd been BEGGING for one for over a year now, but I wanted to wait until we had an extra bedroom to put it in.  Mostly because they're nocturnal, and despite Camille's insistence that she wanted her pet in her own room, I was quite certain that that wouldn't work.

But the joke's on me, because it turns out that chinchillas also have VERY specific temperature needs, and none of our bedrooms have very good climate control.  So she has to stay in our living room.  Which was where we used to keep Oreo.  My living room is the designated rodent habitat.  🤦

Here's the cage, while it was still pristine!  Chinchillas like to jump and climb, so they recommend getting a cage with lots of levels to it.

It was all well and good telling Camille she could finally get a chinchilla, but then they proved harder to find than I had imagined.  I found a rescue place in Maryland and eagerly emailed them explaining that my daughter would take great care of her pet chinchilla, only to get a form letter email back telling me that they will not adopt their chinchillas out to children.  Um, okay?  Do we seriously live in a world now where pets are only for grown ups????  I can't even.

I didn't want to have to drive to Maryland anyway.

I found another place in North Carolina but they had "prize" chinchillas, some of which were selling for $2000!!!!

I didn't want to drive to North Carolina, either.

Finally in desperation I just called our local PetSmart even though I've never seen a chinchilla at their store.  They told me that they don't get chinchillas, but the ones out by Target and in Waynesboro occasionally get them.  The one north of town said they thought they'd be getting one next week.  I can't even tell you how many times I called them to make sure they had in fact gotten a chinchilla (one.  They had ONE chinchilla)?  Was it a female?  What color was she?  Was she available to purchase or was she still being quarantined?

The second she was available, we dashed across town to go get her.  I've never seen Camille so happy.  

You can barely see Ella peering over the PetSmart worker's shoulder there!

Ready to take her home with us!

So we are now the proud owners of a chinchilla named Elephant (between the wrinkly grey skin and the large ears, she does kind of resemble an elephant!), but called Ella for short!

I was actually surprised by how big Ella is!  She looks so fat for having such dainty little paws!

Chinchillas, we are learning, are very fun.  They're kind of like a cross between a bunny and a squirrel-- big tails, but not as big as a squirrel.  They kind of hop, skip, and run along.  And at night, she likes to run on her big wheel and sound like someone is trying to break into the house.  I was right not to put her in Camille's bedroom!

On the Home Front

Craig and the kids were NOT just sitting around twiddling their thumbs while Kendra and I were gone!  The day we left, Colton began moving into Kendra's room.  He had been taking measurements and plotting it all out a month ahead of time (to the point that Kendra wasn't so sure he was even sad that she was leaving), and he hit the ground running when he got home from school!

He brought back the bunk beds

And luxuriated in all the extra space he now has!  (Kendra's room was definitely bigger than his old room!)

Craig sent me this photo with the question, "Can you tell which window I cleaned?"  😬

I like how pretty all his 3D printer filaments are!

It was also the ward's summer party at the Snow's, which I missed (same as two years ago when I took Bentley out to BYU!)--

Camille and Ember

Ryder

I see Colton and Camille in there, along with Peter, Gideon, Maya, Ember, and Bram...

Not sure if Ryder was trying to look like a zombie, but if so, Mission Accomplished!  Nice bonfire!

Anyway, what's not pictured here is that Craig also helped Camille deep clean her room.  I think they got rid of eight garbage bags of stuff?  Six bags of clothing to Goodwill and a lot of trash tossed out.  Not bad!  

And now we have an extra bedroom upstairs!!!  Craig put his drum set in there (which had previously been in Ryder's room, making it very crowded) and also the guitar and keyboard that Colton and Camille took from their Grandpa Smith before they moved.  So I guess now we have a music room?  How's THAT for hoity toity???  

It was nice to come home to a house that was even cleaner than how I left it!  I have an amazing husband!!!  (My kids are pretty great, too!)

Quick Bentley Update

Since he turned 20 (!!!) last week, I guess I should give a quick update on Elder Smith!

The short version is that he's doing great!  About a month ago he got transferred to his third area, St. Croix, and he's absolutely loving it there!  His companion, Elder Thompson, is from Silverdale (that's my stake!) and they seem to be getting along great.  He's enjoying not having to try and speak Spanish.  And he's meeting a lot of really cool people.  It's been awesome.

In case you aren't on Bentley's emailing list, I've saved his letters at eldersmithpr.blogspot.com.  He doesn't write that often, but when he gets around to it, he's pretty hilarious.  (Since a bunch of other people have said that, too, I don't *think* this is just a case of me being a proud mama?)  And he posts pictures here!  They're mostly himself picking up random animals he finds, which cracks me up.  What a goofball.  But seriously, I've never seen him so happy.  And that just makes me so happy.

Here are a few of my favorite pictures, just because I can't help myself!

Since he and his companion can't fly all the way back to PR for Zone Conference, they have to zoom in.  This also means they miss out on the awesome food provided at ZC, so instead, they get to buy themselves dinner on the mission credit card.  This time, they very carefully chose a sushi restaurant they'd heard good things about and...  proceeded to order a hamburger and BBQ chicken???  Teenage boys are so strange!!!  (Also, did they purposely match their ties???)

Look who found a turtle!

And a cat!

And a chick!

The plane that took him to St. Croix.  Those are Bentley's knees jutting up against the pilot's seat.  Nothing to see here, folks, this is super safe!

This lil guy is so cute!

Bentley's caption: elder oso (that's "bear" in Spanish) is still working on the word of wisdom (what's really funny is that they have the cigarette backwards, and Craig had to point that out to me, because I didn't even notice!) 😂

Cute puppy!!!

Is this guy even smaller than the last one???

Why is this very small horse just out and about?  Oh-- I guess it has a rope keeping it there.  

Clearly AI generated to look like it's a page out of Preach My Gospel.  I shouldn't enjoy this, but seriously, it's so wildly inappropriate!!!  I couldn't stop laughing!!!

They got up early and went to the eastern most point of the island so they could be the first Americans to see the sun that day!
Happy birthday, Bentley!!!  Keep rocking it as a missionary!!!!

Utah Day 3 (and 4, and Beyond): Everything Everywhere All at Once

We were absolutely NUTS on Sunday.  We got up early and headed into Salt Lake to watch Music & the Spoken Word.  It was amazing, of course.  I can't believe the Tabernacle Choir prepares that much music every week and has it all memorized!!!!  If they were just singing hymns it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it was a ton of different music.  ALL MEMORIZED!!!!  And they do it every Sunday!  That's just so crazy to me.

Then we got some breakfast at Starbucks.  I felt bad eating out on Sunday, but Jenna had been fighting an awful cold and I would have felt even worse eating all her food.  We figured this was the lesser of two evils.  

We went to church with Nick and the kids, and nearly died laughing when the opening prayer included a plea for moisture (I had literally just warned Kendra that people in Utah LOVE praying for moisture!!!!).  And then we left after sacrament meeting, dropped my Mom back at her hotel so she could get a nap, and Kendra and I drove north to Syracuse to visit our friends, the Rawlins.  They moved away from Virginia about a year ago, so it was good to see them again!  They were very kind and fed us lunch AND gave us each half a loaf of chocolate chip sourdough, which was AMAZING (and kept me from starving on my flights home the next day!).  

We would have loved to have stayed much longer visiting, but we needed to get back to Jenna's and collect Kendra's stuff (as well as my Mom!) so we could get her checked into her dorm room!!!  😱😱😱 

Kendra showing us that she is a bit nervous to be here

We got the best parking space ever and headed into the Cannon Center to get her keys

and take a picture with this amazing blow-up Cosmo!!!

it wasn't hard to find her room (and she's super lucky to be living on the first floor!)

and then it was just a few quick trips to get everything into her room

Holding the key to her dorm room (yes, that's a poster of Fallen Monarchs!)

We unpacked everything we'd brought, but there was still one huge suitcase left at Jenna's that we couldn't fit in the rental car, plus whatever Kendra needed for the next day or two.  But it was good to get this done!

And then, figuring we hadn't seen enough of our friends and the fine state of Utah, we headed over to Heber to have dinner with Luke and Kat Hogan!!!  Like with so many other people on this trip, I forgot to take pictures, but Luke and Kat look remarkably similar to how they looked two years ago when I visited them with Bentley (weirdly enough, their girls all looked two years older)!  Luke could not believe that I had last been there two years ago.  Me neither, Luke.  Me, neither.  We had a wonderful time with them and probably stayed later than we should have!  By the time we got on the road, there was a terrific lightning storm going on and we enjoyed watching all the bolts of lightning while my poor Mom got to drive.  The rain didn't hit until we were on the other side of the mountain and getting close to Sandy, but that was some real rain finally, not just Utah moisture!  

And then the next day was the hard one.  I was planning on getting up around 5, but woke up at 3:30 and just tried to force myself to sleep a bit longer.  We left Jenna's with all our stuff and finished unpacking everything else into Kendra's dorm room and got her re-packed for the Foundations of Leadership Conference.

This time there was a bus to pick up the students living in the dorms, so there were a few kids all waiting around at the Cannon Center for their bus, and Kendra dutifully joined the group.  Mom and I stood there waiting with her for a minute until I looked around and realized we were the only grown ups there and everyone had stopped talking the minute we'd shown up.  It hit me that we were the problem and it was time to leave so Kendra could start making friends.  So of course I burst into tears, gave her a big hug, and then just walked away like the loser who can't manage goodbyes that I am.

Oh, life can be hard.

Mom bought me French toast before we headed to the airport to cheer me up.  And everything went very smoothly and it was nice to be home.  And as far as I can tell, Kendra is having a wonderful time at BYU.  It's funny how I can be so happy for her and still miss her so much.  My little girl.

It wasn't long before we were getting lots of texts and pictures about all the fun she was having.  What a tremendously exciting time for her!

It's not just me, right?  That caricature looks nothing like her...

Forming the Y with her roommate (and third cousin!) Lara on the left to create the following picture:

Taken (obviously) from BYU's instagram page.  Can you spot Kendra???  😂

With Cosmo at the leadership conference!

Hiking the Y

With Jadyn!

With Lara for their ward temple night!

Utah Day 2: SLC

Saturday I let Kendra and my Mom sleep in, while I went and visited President and Sister Grames!

It was really great to see them again, and I was so proud of myself for remembering to actually take a picture this time!  Pres. Grames just published his three volume history of the Church in Japan.  He said he researched it for 25 years, and then was writing it for 10!  What an incredible feat!!!  (He said that the hardest part was finding a publisher in Japan!)

We had a lovely visit, and then it was time to head back to Jenna's and wake up Kendra!  Once she and my Mom were both ready, we got brunch at a diner that Nick had recommended-- The Hub and Spoke.  The place was packed and loud, but then they ushered us into another room that was nearly empty and blissfully quiet!  What luck!  And even better, the food was excellent!  AND the diner turned out to be in the same neighborhood as my grandparents' childhood homes!  So after we'd eaten, we drove by both their homes, which was very cool.  (My Grandma's house especially blows my mind because it is not that big, but she was one of ten siblings!  How did they fit them all in there???)

And then we headed to Temple Square to see the new Visitor's Center!  Reader, no lie, when I saw the Salt Lake Temple without scaffolding all over it, I got teary-eyed.  What a sight!

So pretty!!!

I love when they have these amazing 3-D models!  Who builds these???  (I don't see them in this model, but my favorite is when they have miniatures of the paintings inside!)

They had models of several of our large temples, and I would like to point out that (assuming they used the same scale for all of them?) DC's temple is totally bigger than Salt Lake's!

No doubt about it!

The new visitor's center is really well done.  They basically have full-size replicas of all the major rooms in a temple so you can walk through the whole thing.  The Salt Lake temple is going to have a HUGE open house starting next spring, but even if you miss it, you could still do this new tour.  It's a brilliant idea.

When we got out, it looked like it was going to rain, which made for some very cool pictures:

It being Utah, all we got were a few drops.  Clouds like that in Virginia would have been a very different story!

Next we headed to Caputo's, a small Italian diner/grocery store/chocolate shop.  What you see here is just a section of their chocolate bars.  We spent a VERY LONG TIME poring over which bars we needed to try.  My Mom only sighed in disappointment at my preferences for milk chocolate a couple times.

They also let you sample a lot of the stuff before you bought it, which was so nice of them, we bought even more!  Good sales strategy!

Also, I found these cute pig statues and had to send a picture of them to Ryder!

Finally we went to the Wasatch Lawn Cemetery.  We have a lot of family that were buried there, but unfortunately it is a HUGE cemetery, and the office was closed and we couldn't get the Billion Graves website to work.  So after driving around for a bit, we finally gave up on the idea of being able to just find any of the people we were looking for.  We'll have to try again some other day.  

We got Cafe Rio for dinner and picked up cookies from Crave and ate a few in my Mom's hotel room.  And then shared the rest with Jenna and Nick and stayed up way too late hanging out with them!  That was especially fun since I'd barely seen them so far!