Fun Weekend

Isn't she adorable! I just can't get enough of her. I love holding her as much as I can and soaking up all the cuddles before she turns two and wants to do everything "by self." She's SO cuddly! She just started social smiles last week, but she's very reserved about showing off her beautiful dimples. This is a sweet dreams smile, but adorable all the same.

This weekend we had lots of fun stuff going on. First we got up early and went to the Draper Temple open house. It was beautiful and the kids thought it was really neat. Ryker had a hard time waiting in line and walking so slowly with us through the temple, but he didn't get too wild. Raelin was perfect, as usual, and loved looking at the paintings. It's a beautiful temple and it's cool to have so many close by. It's also really neat to be able to take the kids inside to show them the things that go on there (at least the parts that we can share with them). The baptismal fonts in temples are so cool! They are always below ground level, representative of being buried and born again and the font is supported by 12 full-size oxen statues, representative of the 12 tribes of Israel. I think the highlight for the kids, though, was the bus ride from the church parking lot nearby to the temple grounds. They love buses.

Next we went to a birthday party for our twice-removed niece (Brice's brother's wife's sister's daughter) and they know how to throw a party--they work in the party industry. So that was lots of fun! The kids got their faces painted and played on the moon bounces and all that fun stuff. Then we went to a play of Cindrella with my mom. Some kids in her class were in it and invited her to come. Then off to my parents' house to play in the yard and enjoy the warm weather and to celebrate Brice's birthday. My parents gave him a gift card to the movies (he loves going to the movies) so we decided to go that night. My mom took the kids to another showing of the Cinderella play with a different cast while Brice and I went on a date! Oooo, fun!

On Sunday we had stake conference for church, but we didn't know what time. As lame of an excuse as I know that is, it was enough to motivate us to stay home and rest. Church is stressful with little kids! They are noisy and rowdy. In the afternoon, we went for a picnic out at Utah Lake. The kids and Brice ran all around through the reeds as we walked around on the trails. They played hide and go seek and dinosaur and just ran, ran, ran.

Brice the Dinosaur

We also found some AWESOME wildlife to take pictures of! Brice and I love to take pictures of cool animals. Check these out!

There were were four bald eagles in three different trees. The first tree we saw them in was about 1/8 of a mile off the road. The other two trees were a little closer, but not much. Getting these pictures without a tripod was a bit tricky!

Brice tried to walk out into the field to get a closer picture, but he was spotted:
and the eagle flew off.

This one's a juvenile. There was a lady with binoculars that knew a lot about birds and she told us that it takes about three years for their heads to turn white. She also said that during migration, the birds LOVE to come through the area and just hang out for a while. We'll be going back a LOT this spring!

There's a tree right in the middle of this picture (above) that you can just barely see (if you click on the picture, it will open it up bigger). That's one of the trees the birds were in that we were taking pictures of; it's the closer tree even. I wanted to show how far away we were, so this picture isn't zoomed in at all. The zoom on our camera amazes me!

This is that same tree, just zoomed in a little.

And this is the ugliest cute thing I've ever seen. It's a baby donkey, in case it's too ugly to tell.