Michael & Amanda and chicklets to call our own: Heidi comes to visit!

Heidi is my older sister. She is the oldest in the family. She has 3 kids, Paul Jr, Ryan, and EmmaLynn. She and her husband, Paul, are living in Manassas, VA. Heidi is a school teacher for 6th grade, I think.

Since I moved away from Tennessee, I think I've only seen Heidi three times. Three times in 3 years is just not fair. Especially considering that those 3 times were in the first year and a half. She hadn't met Charlotte yet and had only met Ivan when he was 3 months old. We were far overdue for a visit.

She flew out here on Monday the 19. She lives pretty close to DC, so when she was booking her flight, she chose the option for the computer to find the cheapest airport within a certain radius of where she lives. Instead of that actually being true for where her departure, she had put it for her arrival. Instead of flying into Idaho Falls, she flew into Jackson Hole. That's about a hour and a half difference of drive time. That's ok, we were in Alpine, which was only 30-40 minutes away from Jackson anyway, so it worked out better than I thought. Plus I love Jackson and wanted Heidi to see some of it. We got to see the mountains, which is the best part, and we had dinner at the Blue Lion. We even drove through Teton National Park to show off Jenny Lake. I love that place!

This little guy came right up to my foot.

At Jenny Lake, Teton National Park

That place was really awesome. We had duck cakes, risotto, fancy salads with weird dressings. There was a guy there playing the guitar for a peaceful ambiance. Ivan did not want to be there though. There was a park across the street, so Michael and I took turns taking him there. The restaurant was a little more fancy than we're used to, so I didn't want to have a crying toddler interrupting everyone else's evening. Ivan had the alfredo pasta for dinner. All he did was play with it. He took handfuls of it off his plate and put it on the table. Apparently that was pretty amusing. There was this older couple sitting at the table next to us that just kept laughing every time they looked over at us. They even complimented us as they left, saying that they had never had such an amusing show with their dinner before. Guess they don't have kids.

The next day, Tuesday, we got a baby sitter and headed north. We stopped at Mesa Falls and saw the falls. Then we went to Big Spring and floated the river. Big Spring is pretty much where the Snake River starts. We get there, inflate the tubes, and put them in the river only to look up and see a moose! I'm pretty sure this is the first time Heidi had ever seen a moose, but it sure wasn't the last. She was pretty nervous, but he was headed in the opposite direction from us. We were thinking the float would take us about 2-2.5 hours. So when we started dragging on the bottom of the river and getting stuck on the grass in the water, we decided we needed some help to get us going a little faster, especially since our baby sitter probably didn't want to watch our kids longer than the 5 hours we told her about. Michael got out and fetched us some sticks to paddle with. This was kinda difficult considering we were in tubes, not a raft. And the water was a little cold.

We ran almost the whole way to the falls and the whole way back cuz we were in such a hurry.

We put our tubes in at Big Springs, which is here, and this is where we saw our first moose! She was on the other side of the river from us though.

This moose is actually from the last time we went to Mesa Falls, about 2 weeks earlier, but I thought I'd give proof that moose are really big.

Further down the river, we saw another moose! This time it was a huge bull moose laying down on the bank of the river. The grass was pretty tall there, so you could only see the top of his head and his huge antlers. Let me tell ya, Heidi was scared! We saw it and immediately got to the opposite side of the river, I figured a little more distance couldn't hurt. I'm pretty sure he was asleep, but there was a group of girls behind us that were making all sorts of noise and didn't see the moose until they were right next to him. That was scary. But the moose never moved.

And again, further down the river, we saw another moose! This time the river was getting pretty curvy so we couldn't see very far down river. All we heard was a bunch of splashing. I thought it might have been the group of people in front of us that were in a canoe. Nope, it was a cow moose. She was huge too! She was just getting out of the river when we floated around the bend. She stopped just before getting onto the bank and had her back to us. She watch us the whole time we floated by her. And what seemed like an hour was only a couple minutes just watching each other. This time Heidi was really afraid. She clung to us and tried to push Michael closer to the moose so she would be farther away. I told Heidi to put her life jacket on so that if the moose tried to attack us, then she'd have more padding! Oh, poor thing. The moose never did move. We floated right by like it was nothing but a thing. We watched birds diving into the river to chase muskrats. And when we finally got to the end it was really starting to get cold. We only had one car, so we dropped Michael's bike off at the take out point and used the car to take the tubes to where we started the float. Then at the end, Michael rode his bike back to get the car and bring it around for the tubes. The float ended up taking us more like 3 and a half hours, but it was so so fun!

We built a fort in the living room for Ivan to play in on Wednesday. He loves Heidi so much! He built a block tower with her, then asked me to take a picture of it. I showed Heidi around town a little bit and we just hung out all day. We did get to go shopping in Idaho Falls. I showed Heidi the miracle of the DI and we found some sweet deals there.

Ivan LOVES Heidi!

They built a block tower together and Ivan asked to take a picture with it.

Thursday Heidi had to be back at the airport at 2. We got up early and went through part of Yellowstone. We got to see Old Faithful and some of the hot pools of the geyser basin. We saw lots of buffalo, some elk, antelope, and a chipmunk (well, that was technically on Monday, but close enough).

Bacteria mat from the Grand Prismatic Spring.

Fountain Paint Pots

We've seen this steam vent several times and never really looked twice at it. It's pretty much just a hole in the ground. This time, it was whistling like a tea pot, super loud and more like a train whistle.