Nauvoo/Carthage

Here are a few more pics of our Nauvoo/Carthage trip. The Nauvoo Temple is beautiful, and April tried to capture some shots when we happened to be there at dusk. We all had a nice stroll around the Temple, which also brought up some good conversations about the Temple with the kids.

Our next visit was to Carthage jail, where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were kept behind bars and eventually killed. Unfortunately, we didn't get to go inside the jail because the floors were being repainted. But we did get to walk around the outside and went in the visitor's center. At least it was a nice day!

Nate and Elin with Joseph and Hyrum.

The jail itself.

Trip to Nauvoo

Here are some pics from Nauvoo, IL. The kids liked this trip even more than I thought they would, which was a nice surprise. Nate's favorite places, I think, were the blacksmith and gunsmith shops (no surprise). April really liked the printing office (again, no surprise), and if I had to pick a favorite it would probably be visiting the insides of the rebuilt homes and learning of all the practical ways the Saints lived... there is so much that I take for granted and never think about.

Nate posing under a replica of the Christus statue at the visitor's center.

Elin on a lamb at the Family Living Center... very cool place where we learned how they made candles, bread, rope, fabric, and some other things.

This rope-making machine is incredibly simple... just turn the wheels!

Nate and Elin participating in the rope-making process, and they even got to keep some rope!

Here we learned how to heat and shape metal... the kids got to keep the mini horse shoe that the nice man made (and oh so excited about it!)

Outside Brigham Young's (rebuilt) home.

The gunsmith shop... where we learned how they made the barrels among other things.

The printing shop was really cool. Here you can see where they kept the capital letters (in the "upper case") and the small letters (in the "lower case").

Here's the actual press... Nate loved all the gears and especially getting to work it.

You can see how tedious a process it must have been to get all the metal letters in the right spots to print. Note the "p" and "q" standing up on the table, and imagine how easy it would be to get these mixed up or replaced in the wrong letter bin... you'd better "mind your p's and q's".

We went to the local culture hall to see these missionaries in their small musical "Rendevous in Nauvoo". It was great, and the kids actually loved it. Note Nate's head at the bottom.

The beautiful Nauvoo Temple at night... my little point-and-shoot didn't do it justice.

Spring Break???

So after another big melt-off last week, and only big piles of snow remained, here we are again on our spring break... just how we wanted to spend it! It was an icy storm- sleet and hail- so here's Elin helping me put out some salt for the walk/driveway.

I'm sure someone is enjoying springtime somewhere.

Father Night

Elin and I spent an hour together at her school with other Dads and kids. We worked on some projects together, like this color-mixing lesson. Elin was so excited to get this cowgirl hat... one of her favorite characters is Jessie from Toy Story III, and she kept yelling "yahoo! yahoo!"

Mr. Mom weekend

Since April has been out of town this weekend, it's just been us 3 kids to fend for ourselves. On Saturday we went to a birthday party for one of Elin's friends at a children's museum, so of course I took advantage of the time out and we spent the afternoon there.

Elin and friends dressing up in way-too-big dresses and fancy hats. Elin liked it for about 10 seconds.

Impressive cake!

Now in her crown and magic wand... she liked this much better.

The birthday gang.

Elin could spend hours in the water room.

Nate working hard on his artistic masterpiece.

Elin and Nate in the tree house... where were these places when I was a kid?

Nate up in the tree house look-out.

And the star of the show is...!!!!

Check Your Caulk First.

I went to re-caulk around our kitchen sink and counter, and found some left-over caulk from 2 years ago... and it was still soft! So of course I do the job and feel good about myself. Well, two days later I was surprised to find it was still soft. So after some research I learned that caulk can not only dry out, but can lose its solidifying properties. I really enjoyed removing all this hard work to do it all again with new caulk. So check your caulk first!

Snowed In... Again

After a big melt-off last week, I thought (just for a moment) perhaps we were past the huge snow-storm stages of winter. Well, so much for daydreaming about spring. That's okay, I was starting to miss the shoveling.

The view off our front porch.

Kalahari!

Last weekend we spent a night at the Kalahari water park- our kids absolutely love this place. We actually surprised Nate when we picked him up early from school on Friday to go, so of course he was ecstatic. This place has so much to do, there's no way you could do it all in one visit. So we spent most of our time in the water park, then picked a couple of other things.

Mother and daughter... and elephant.

We love Chocolate Shoppe ice cream!

I'm not sure what draws children to sit on something that bounces around for one minute, but something about Pumba appealed to Elin, so...

At night we snuggled up and watched James and the Giant Peach.

The giant wave pool was fun and incredibly warm. I was surprised, with all the 4-story waterslides, that Nate wanted to spend most of his time in the pool. I was itching to keep going on the slides, but alas...

Nate did this like 10 times... I had to drag him away eventually.

It's hard to get good pics of the kids on waterslides. In fact, it's hard to get any good pics in a water park- it's just not the ideal place to carry a camera around.

"Cheeeeeeese!"

Nate has always been a climber, but this was his first real rock-wall experience. He liked it, but it did give him some challenges he didn't expect.

I love watching the kids try to throw a heavy ball down the lane... they become very innovative thinking of different ways to do this.

"Hmmm, I thing my next play will be..."

"Okay, Elin, it's not looking so good..."

All in all a great short-and-sweet trip... I'm sure we'll be going back again.

Enough said.