we stopped in arizona en route to utah from london. ian’s parents are serving as mission leaders (overseeing hundreds of volunteer missionaries) there and we were excited to introduce them to the twins, visit their home, and have the boys play with their awesome grandparents! july is … not the best time to visit arizona (holy hot!!!!) but despite the heat it was a great place to recover from jet lag and celebrate the fourth of july in the usa and with family 🙂

after we arrived, it was straight to the swimming pool!! moses and gabriel were in heaven (and we were all glad for a chance to cool down).

it was so, so wonderful for the kiddos to have some time doing all kinds of fun things with grandma and grandpa.

another reason we stopped in arizona was because there were much better buying options for minivans there than in utah. on our first day back in the united states, we bought a car! i never thought we’d ever buy a brand new car, but the used car market was so crazy that it just made sense. somehow this is the only picture i have of our new honda odyssey in arizona. i can’t remember where ian was going with the boys, but they definitely were feeling the jet lag, haha! we named our black van “hargle.”

my sister lives in the same town as my in-laws, but she was in utah when we were in arizona! we still went to her house though, and played in her pool to switch things up a bit. moses loved jumping off the platform.

we also went with grandma to a really cool splash pad.

fourth of july fun: we got a big box of little fireworks and mo and gabes were sooooo thrilled about it. we dressed the babies in stars and stripes (patriotic outfits are absolutely my favourite thing about independence day!)…

… and had a little fireworks show in the back yard. it did feel great to be back in america on the fourth of july.

after church on sunday we visited the temple grounds and snapped some photos. i’m so glad that the babies were able to meet their grandparents before they had grown too big!

then, it was on to our new home in utah! ian drove in the new car with august and moses, and i few on an airplane with gabriel and eve. the only photos we got from both of our journeys:

by the time we all got to my parents’ place in salt lake city, we were still pretty bewildered, and the next couple of months were honestly really hard. but we made it to our new home, with london in our hearts.

we went down to provo to check out some neighbourhoods (and enjoyed the slide at the byu bookstore…), and we got to meet up in salt lake with our sister-in-law lucia and our nieces sophia, olivia, and emilia. emilia was born just a couple of weeks after the twins so it was so fun to see these three wright babies all together (and yes this was the best photo we got, haha). all the cousins played together at a play place for a while and it was wonderful!

and then we headed up to bear lake!