Our friends the Garcia family from Vienna came to Utah to take their son Ian to the Missionary Training Center in Provo. We don’t often get to see friends from Vienna so we packed up the kids and drove up to Provo. It was fun to take the kids to BYU and show them around the university Chris and I both went to.
Here is Elora with her favorite painting in the BYU art museum. I love taking Elora to museums, she loves to look at all the paintings and always has favorites that she likes to spend time looking at.
Chris and Ed walking around the museum.
Oliver was fascinated by this one. It is a stack of blankets and it is actually so cool because each blanket was donated by a different person and has a label with a story about where the blanket came from or why it was special. I read a few of the stories to Oliver and he though that was really neat.
You can tell which of our kids were raised in Vienna and went to museums and which one has grown up in the country… Marion thought it would be funny to run around and around and around and it is pretty hard to catch that little one. This may be why I don’t venture to museums more often…
James liked this one. There was a whole section of paintings of Zion. Maybe James is saying, “Hey! I have been there!”
Marion liked sitting down and looking at the art books. Eventually she found a couple paintings she liked. At first I asked her which one she liked and she said, “I didn’t like any.” A typical Marion response…
Marion dancing with Ed… which was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
After the Garcia’s left to take a tour of the campus we showed the kids around a couple spots. The kids liked walking on the bridge over the road. We wanted to take them to the Bean life science museum, but it was closed. So disappointing. But on the bright side it looks like they are remodeling to make it bigger and it is my favorite place on campus so I am excited to see it improved.
James likes sitting on Daddy’s head.
The kids were fascinated by the bell tower and were really excited to be walking by when it rang. To our surprise the door was open and there was a girl there playing the carillon. She told the kids to come in and showed them where she played and played some music for them. It was so awesome. She was really great with the kids and it was nice of her to show them around.
This is a new pond and river that was built after Chris and I graduated, but it is really pretty. Marion REALLY wanted to pet a duck, but luckily Chris kept her from ending up in the pond…
We took the kids to the book store. And then we stayed for almost an hour as the kids looked at book after book after book… which means I looked at a lot of books in the clearance section and found lots of fun ones to buy. I love book stores and the kids do too. It is fun to see them all sitting and reading. I love my book worms.
Marion loved this sculpture. Especially the frog. She really wanted to hold it.
We took the kids up to Y mountain to show them where we used to live and let them run around a little. It was getting dark so we didn’t hike. We’ll have to do that on another trip, the kids really wanted to go see the big Y.
The sunset was pretty and I wanted a picture of Chris with all the kids. Marion didn’t want to be in it, so here is Chris and Oliver trying to convince her to come.
And this picture right here is a pretty accurate look at what it is like to try and take pictures of our whole family. Which is why we have absolutely no current family pictures.
Big rocks are really fun.
The kids had seen the Provo temple from far away and really wanted to go see it. We drove by and there was NO parking, so we just drove around it and parked in a couple places so the kids could see it and Marion asked us to sing, “I Love to See the Temple” over and over. It was a really peaceful time with the kids. I love singing with them and Marion loves that song and sang along with us too.
Chris and I used to spend a lot of time here so it was nice to see it. It brings back so many wonderful memories.
We went to Tucano’s Brazilian Grill for dinner which is a restaurant where they cook all kinds of meat and bring out all different kids for you to try and you can eat as much as you want. Well, Oliver doesn’t like meat, so I have this awesome picture of my cute little boy at an all you can eat amazing meat grill restaurant eating raw spinach for dinner. I love this kid. He is so funny.
Here is the waiter bringing out meat. You get little tongs to grab the meat that you want and he cuts it off of the big metal skewer for you. The food is so good. And Marion LOVES meat, so she was really excited.
Next door was the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory so we let the kids pick out a treat. We had such a great time showing our kids around all the places we used to go. There was a swimming pool at our hotel which we hadn’t counted on, so I went to Shopko and bought the cheapest sportswear I could find so we could go swimming. The funny part is I thought, “Oh, I’ll just run in really quick”. Well, when you have a family of six, you can’t really go quick because I had to visit every single clothing department in the store, and even though it was cheap clothing, when you are buying for six people, it is still not that cheap! But we had a great time swimming in a nice and warm indoor pool, so it was probably worth it (even though we were full of meat and I thought I would sink to the bottom!)
