The Randalls

One lovely June morning I was admiring my month-old garden. It just so happened to be at the same time my neighbor’s cat, Oreo came trotting across the back patio with a pretty good-sized snake hanging from his mouth.

Nice, right? As soon as I told Téa what I was watching we all went outside to watch the cats play with the snake. Oreo left it on the porch and quickly lost interest. Maybe he finally realized his pray fights back? Then my neighbor’s other cat, Smokey (Maximus’ brother) decided he wanted a turn at the snake.

We let the cats play with it a little more and Téa decided she wanted a turn. Just as she was picking it up my neighbor, Dan came outside with is dog, Kea and so we took the opportunity to introduce Kea to a snake. We weren’t sure what he would do, but Téa was very close by to make sure Kea didn’t eat it.

Holding snakes is no big deal when you’re 11, I guess.

Téa wanted to introduce the snake to her sisters as well.  Piper had no problems with it.

What a lovely new bracelet you have, Piper.

Calista was a little more leery of having the snake close to her but she found her courage and pet it a little.

Téa was starting to feel bad for the snake so I sent all the girls to the Jordan River trail to let him go free near the river. He’ll be much happier there…and so will I. Now, I’m not deathly afraid of snakes but notice you don’t see any pictures of me holding it.

Our last day of vacation. Jeff set up a time for us to do sealings at the Newport Beach temple early in the morning so we could fit it in before we had to check out of the hotel. It was a great way to end a great vacation. Jeff has been getting us lots of family names to do their temple work. I love that we get together often to do the sealings together as family.
Marin, Markee and Megyn came as well to do baptisms. Afterwards, we had to take pictures, of course. Newport Beach temple is really different than most of our temples. I think the architecture fits well.


We had a little fun with pictures.

All the girls got into it, except Beverley, of course. The new hip just wasn’t up for jumping. Apparently I don’t know how to count. I guess I missed the countdown. I was way off.

All the handsome boys. Jared was mocking Mark’s hip thing he used to always do in pictures as a kid.

Mark didn’t find it funny, so he refused to jump. I still can’t believe Bruce jumped. It wasn’t a pretty landing.

The flowers were beautiful on the temple grounds.

I had to add this picture to show that I finally got the counting down.

After our photo shoot we headed back and frantically packed everything up. Jeff found out checkout was two hours sooner than we had planned.  Oops. We made it (barely) and we all parted ways to head back to Utah.
Our original plans were to stay in Los Angeles that night but we were tired so we headed to Mesquite instead. It was the worst travel day I can ever remember having. It took us 9.5 hours to get from Los Angeles to Mesquite when it should have taken us about 5 or 6. An awful accident just outside Baker, CA had traffic backed up for hours and hours. After we finally passed that, we hit awful road construction, twice between Las Vegas and Mesquite. Thankfully, the next day traveling the rest of the way back home to Utah was uneventful.
I’m so glad we made this trip a reality. We had an amazing time. I know my kids will have these memories forever and so will I.