Mountain Fun (question mark)

One of my favorite things ever is when Matt will take a day off from work right in the middle of a week.  Well, things have been slowing down for him at work lately, and since it's the last full week before school starts again, he decided to take yesterday and today off.  It's been great having him around all day.

 Yesterday the weather was pretty rainy and cloudy all day, so it was pretty low key.  We took the kids to the library for "moving & grooving", we went to Costco, took naps, and then went to Ikea for dinner.  Did you know kids eat for free on Tuesdays? Also, the Ikea cafe is one of the few restaurants we can take Aubrey too, because if we sit right next to the glass balcony she can watch the escalator...and it will keep her attention long enough to sit through a whole meal.  These are the kind of things you learn after 7 years.

This afternoon the sun came out, but it stayed nice and cool.  We decided to head up American Fork Canyon because we figured it wouldn't be crowded on a Wednesday afternoon, and we wanted to spend some time in the great outdoors.  It was absolutely gorgeous, and there were hardly any other folks up there.

We didn't do as much exploring as we would have liked because Aubrey was pretty unhappy most of the time.  She did an awful lot of crying and freaking out.  She seemed really anxious and didn't want to get out of the car whenever we stopped.  But we made her, because well... life has to move on.  Once I pulled out my phone and started taking pictures of her, and let her look at the pictures, she cheered up.  But every time we stopped to get out of the car and walk around, the meltdowns started all over again.

 A smile!

 Matt offered to stay back at the car with Aubrey so Charlie and I could go for a little adventure, but of course Charlie didn't want to go very far without Daddy.

We stopped to play for a while at Tibble Fork Reservoir, and both Aubs and Charlie had a lot of fun at the beach there.

Outings like this are never easy for Aubrey.  Sometimes we come home in a sour mood and wonder why we even did it in the first place.  Some parts of this outing were like that, but some parts were really nice.  So I guess that's why we keep doing it.  And stopping for a little Cafe Rio on the way home definitely didn't hurt the situation. :)