Dance, Retirement, Vegas

We've had an eventful June. It started with Sophie's (and my) dance recital. It was Sophie's first and she truly did amazing. I only had eyes for her, but when I look back on the videos and see her compared to other kids, she really did shine.

Then, I had a huge dream come trye when my mom (kinda suddenly in my eyes, especially considering how long I had been begging for it to happen) retired! We celebrated at the very fitting Anchos and then popped questionable champagne afterwards in the parking lot.

After Sophie had her last day of preschool (wow!) our family took off to Vegas for the weekend. AJ and I were really looking forward to it for awhile, for lots of reasons, but man it felt great to get that Vegas energy again after so long away! I hadn't been since 2020 (the weekend before the world shut down!) and AJ since maybe 2022.

We stayed at MGM, which I was excited about because I wanna stay in every one of these hotels and hadn't stayed there yet, and it was also specifically chosen because of their lazy river and grand pool complex, and we were there with the kids.

It was both super fun and super... something, being there with kids ha. It was fun to explore things there with them for the first time, but also super painful to be there with kids! It's hard to watch others drink and gamble and sleep in while we were... not those things haha. But it was such a fun time!

First of all, lazy rivers are absolutely where it's at. We all had such a good time, and it really worked well with Sophie's and Summer's respective floaties and being able to just float along with us with no effort. We overlapped with Gangy and Grandpa Jim for a day and that was fun to be int he lazy river with them, and then regrouping in the afternoon at the M&M World and then Buca di Beppo at Excalibur followed by the Fun Dungeon haha.

View from our room

Gold lion!

Our green hotel with the gold lion!

I was wondering what we would do with kids in Vegas but there really is a lot! I mean I was fine with the lazy river and naps but you know, these kids need more. We walked the Strip, played games, took the monorail, spent way too much money in the Flamingo hotel gift shop, and went to Excalibur's Fungeon (not a typo) more than once.

It was too windy for the fountain shows womp womp

We really had so much fun we were debating staying another night but then we remembered why we were checking out on Saturday as it was - we were absolutely not going to do that Sunday drive back with the girls and quadruple the drive time. So we still left Saturday. It was for the best, we got to do laundry and clean and getting ready for the week. Sophie was starting summer camp at her school but we had a hard time explaining what summer camp was to her.

On Monday after she got back, I asked her how camp was and the response I got was "we didn't camp. It was a normal day."

Oh well, I tried.

Yosemite National Park

I didn't realize I never talked about Yosemite, but I suppose things have been all over the place for awhile.

Avid camper as she is, my mom has been begging us to join her to Yosemite for forever, and while I honestly I probably would have kept putting it off, we had the time for Sophie's April break and no excuses left (ha) so we finally made the trek with her last month.

The trip was actually great! The long drive wasn't as bad as I had anticipated with the two little ones, but we had a few moments. Sophie puked on the drive up, about 20 minutes away from our Curry Village campsite at Housekeeping, had one rough meltdown on the drive home before she finally passed out in her car seat, and on one particularly long and tiresome stretch along the grapevine, while Sophie and AJ slept and I fought my fatigue, Summer spent (I'm not joking) about an hour straight saying "Mama! Mama!" until I said "Yes?" and she would say "Cuck!" as she pointed out every. single. truck. that drove by hahaha. It was annoying but also super cute, especially because she's less verbal than Sophie and I didn't want to discourage her pride at utilizing her new vocabulary.

I feel like the trip was partly made as great as it was by our amazing camp site. Our issued spots were RIGHT along the river, with nothing between us and nature, so that we got to wake up and have nothing but a great front porch of room to run and walk right down to the river beach, unobstructed views of the river, the cliff sides, and Yosemite Falls waterfall. 

The girls had a great time, and did so well with camping in general. AJ and I suffered a little bit more considering every night we ended up all 4 of us sharing a full size bed, running around trying to keep the girls from eating food dropped in the dirt, and me having to restrain my neuroses at how dirty they continued to get.

Gangy and Grandpa Jim had all the camping bells and whistles and saved us more than once (how did AJ and I forget our own sleeping bags and blankets?) and we started morning off with hot breakfasts, spent days hiking, playing in the river, going to ranger talks and flying kites, and the evenings roasting s'mores, watching our rainbow fire burn, and stargazing. It had been years since I had seen so many stars! It did get freakily dark (turning our flashlights off made me nervous for a hot second and you really had to concentrate to not think about bears lol) and the whole bear box situation was certainly something but we all survived!

The neatest part about Yosemite was how... accurate it was. The pictures that you see are exactly what you get. It's not well-angled photos or specific slivers. The whole valley is just breathtakingly beautiful, well-maintained and not overdone or over-developed, and I think I was starting to believe such beautiful nature existed only in pictures anymore. I haven't seen much of the national parks, but Yosemite's valley- the cliffs, the river, trees, waterfalls, nature, etc seem so unique from anywhere else.

The girls had a great time and are amazingly still so attached to the stuffed black bears that Gangy bought them on night one.

As fun as the trip was (and I'm sure there are more in the future) - maybe nothing felt as great as getting those girls in a bath immediately upon arrival home!

Roses and Magic

Talk about a dream come true! I joined Bachelor Nation in 2021 (remember The Year of the Bachelor?), and I since dragged in my mom and Kathleen to be citizens as well. We all signed up for alerts and it's actually happened more than once that we got the email invites to put our hat in the ring for tickets to the tapings, and we even actually finally secured tickets, but I ultimately had to back out because I was just too pregnant with Summer to be able to commit to their 7 hour days of mostly sitting.

Well, thanks to Kathleen, we finally officially scored tickets when we were both available and got to go watch Grant's live finale taping! My goal was not just to end up on TV with my reactions, but I wanted to straight up become a meme so that I could strike it rich and stop working LOL. We practiced our facial reactions for weeks, giving each other different scenarios to react to. The meme part hasn't exactly come down the pipeline just yet, but Kathleen and I both got some great screentime, so... Mission Accomplished! (I also have only had ONE friend randomly text me to say she saw me on the TV taping, darn I thought I was cooler lol)

It was a long day. Getting screen ready (yeah that's probably still debatable), getting up to Studio City, checking in, going through security, staying in the holding tank and signing NDAs (seems weird considering it was live but okay), having their provided lunch and coffee, and then finally getting into the audience and ready.

I will say, there is clearly a method to their seating madness (took much longer for them to assign everyone somewhere to go) but I'm happy to report that Kathleen and I were Second Row Hot.

It was actually really cool watching the finale live together with the audience, Jesse Palmer and the other members of Bachelor Nation, but oh my Lord it is EXHAUSTING having to clap and cheer every intro and outro, and, as they remind you - the camera is always on. It is doubly exhausting to constantly being conscious about your face - it wore off quickly.

We were exhausted by the end and still had a long drive home. We collected our swag and on the drive home, the west coast airing was starting, so Kathleen was getting texts from friends about seeing her and my mom was sending our reaction clips which were cracking us up - I'd go so many more times to do it all over again! (Assuming we're not blacklisted lol)

Kathleen's great recap of most of our screentimes

My swag the morning after... oh yeah

Then... the magic!! I am obsessed with magic, like, I really love it. I still haven't found a way into The Magic Castle (one of these days. Sigh) but not too long ago I found another magic place in LA, called Black Rabbit Rose. At first I was going to make AJ take me there for my birthday dinner, but then San Diego came along and I didn't want to drive up to LA Friday night and down to San Diego Saturday morning, so I tabled it. But then I mentioned it to Jessica and we insisted that we make it happen, and do it in March so it will still be for my birthday.

And that's what last Saturday was! And it was AWESOME. AJ and I had the best night out that we've had in a long time, I feel like we're still enjoying how much fun it was.

My mom and Kathleen came over to watch the girls. AJ and I headed up and met Jessica and Doug in Hollywood. AJ had a magic trick done for him while he was getting my dirty martini at the bar, and then we got seated extremely close to the stage in a very small setting.

I was approached before the show by one of the performers, asking me to think of a personal item I could share later on, but not to tell her or show her anything. (Well, she approached Jessica first but Jessica asked them to do me since I love magic so much).

The show was fun, and there were definitely some wtf moments, and the trick that I took part in included 4 people putting personal items into velvet bags, collected by someone, and the performer then took them out one by one and guessed who they belonged to "based on our energies." She said the more personal they were the better, and I happened to find an old ultrasound of Summer in my purse and made that my item. (Funny story - my doctor with Summer gave me dozens of ultrasounds every appointment - I have so many of them all over the place, I still find them in unexpected places lol) and long story short - she guessed mine!

The last trick was kinda wild. We all had 4 playing cards at our chairs when we arrived. They led us in a whole method of bending the cards, ripping them in half, choosing one 'secret' half to hide away, throwing half the cards, keeping half the cards, then taking the last one and seeing if it matched the secret card you hid away to have your wish come true - and it worked!! Well it worked for everyone I knew and everyone I saw except AJ haha! Poor guy. He's either bad at directions or doesn't believe in magic enough for it to deliver. Maybe a little bit of both.

After the show we decided to visit a nearby hookah lounge, where we had the entire place to ourselves because it was only 10p and as they told us, people don't really show up until about 2a, so we had the place to ourselves, a VIP table, and they let us choose our music. It was awesome.

When it was time to leave, AJ and I got pizza from a window on Hollywood Boulevard and then had a car karaoke fest on the long drive home.

Now if only I could get into The Magic Castle!