When Things Don't Go as Planned...or, In Other Words, Life.

So far, July has been a month of things not going as planned. I'm obviously quite spoiled, and these are first world problems like nothing else. But it is still disappointing when things go wrong.

I'm always a little bit of a clingy, control freak wife during the summer because I have so little time with Ryan during the school year that I try to find every free (or cheap) fun thing Utah has to offer and convince Ryan to do them all with me. Every ward activity, every party, every farmer's market, all the yard sales, movies at the park, hikes, camping, etc. I want him to go on walks with me at night, and we go to the gym during the day. You get the picture.

He's normally not interested in much that involves other people, but he agrees to do some activities to appease me. His idea of a good time is to lay in bed and read or to watch TV and relax when he gets home, but I always want to do something outside of the house, something fun.

Unfortunately, I'm starting to feel like the world doesn't want us to do fun things. For instance, I convinced Ryan to go to the ward Fourth of July party if I agreed to let us get Two Jacks cheese bread for dinner. So we put Rose in the stroller and walked to Center Street to get our cheese bread and on the way the tire fell off the stroller. By the time we got the stroller somewhat fixed and walked all the way back to the block party, there wasn't much left of the party, so we just went home. (That was probably Ryan's hope all along.)

Keepin' it real: We only did sparklers for about 10 minutes because Rose was determined to grab on to the sparkly part. She did not like that we kept holding them too far away from her. 

I told myself it was fine, because the next day we could watch fireworks and go to the Freedom Day's carnival. Unfortunately, our house is surrounded by VERY tall trees (which isn't unfortunate normally) and we couldn't see much of the fireworks shows that night, we sat in our yard and tried, but there just wasn't much of a show.

We also decided to wait and go to the carnival on Saturday... because we thought it went through Saturday, but when we walked to the carnival on Saturday evening they were finishing up packing the carnival up. I was so sure the carnival would be there until late Saturday night, but sadly, everything was gone except for a few canopies that were in the process of going down. No cotton candy for me... :(

No worries though because we had planned a camping trip up in Provo Canyon for this past week. Ryan had the time off of work, everything was working out perfectly. We got the car packed, drove into the mountains, spent 45 minutes finding the perfect spot. We lugged all of our stuff from the car to our spot. Set up our tent, set up a pack n play in the tent (for Rose), Ryan chopped up firewood, and then we went to make dinner and realized we had forgotten the matches. It was nearly 8 by then and we were all starving, so the only option was to just pack up camp and head back home because it would have taken nearly 2 hours to get matches and come back to get the fire going.

It was really a bummer to have to come home and sleep in our 89 degree apartment at 9:30 pm when we were expecting to sleep in the cooler temperatures the canyon has to offer.

I do have pictures of our tent in a beautiful place, but it wasn't as magical as it looks, because we were only there for about an hour and a half.

Ryan set this whole tent up, and then had to take it right back down.. Poor guy. 

Social Media tends to make it seem like things should never go wrong. Vacations go smoothly, pictures turn out perfect, house decor just flawlessly comes together, children wear cute clothes without spilling any food on them, and bows stay in a baby's hair. Well, unless my life is totally unique, I can testify that vacations almost never go as planned, it takes 30 bad pictures to get one with everyone smiling, house decor only comes together perfectly if you have lots of money to spend on it, babies spill EVERYTHING, they can make a mess out of nothing, and the bows I put on Rose's head only ever last about 5 minutes.

This is the sunset picture I captured as we drove back down the mountain after packing everything up again. 

Here is a friendly reminder that pictures do not tell the whole story, and it is easy to share pictures that make life look like it should be flawless, but things are going to go wrong. Accept it. Make the most of it. Enjoy it.

Here's to unexpected twists and turns in our daily lives, fun stories to tell and laugh about one day, and hoping for some solid, fun plans that go through in what's left of summer break for us.

C'est la vie.