Busy Monday

I guess I don't really need to title any of my posts, "busy" any more as it may just be assumed that we are always busy! Lowell made a mistake today that he often avoids, he told me ahead of time that he had a day off and of course I scheduled it up. I don't even know why I do it, it is subconscious--Lowell's off let's do this and this and this. So today we went to the Draper temple Open house. I had been thinking about it and Lowell said he thought there were no reservations left and that you had to call a 1-800 # to get them. I trusted him but thought I would check the website just in case and turns out there are plenty of spaces still available. I was amazed at the organization for the open house--parking attendants (note there are separate parking lots and you can only park in the color you are assigned) ushers in the church house, sister missionaries playing a video, ushers for the bus, lots of attendants in the temple, more sister missionaries at the church after the tour (cookies are provided), more bus people, etc. Lots of volunteers involved to share this beautiful temple with the world. And it was beautiful, smaller than I expected but that may be because the Timp temple is rather large. The boys did not do well for the video but were fairly well behaved inside the temple. We had been talking about it and they were very excited this morning to "go see the temp-ull" and "go to Jesus's house". Such faith-filled kids, every time we go to "Jesus's house" they expect to actually see Jesus. I guess who I am to say they won't. In fact there was a bit of an odd moment when Davis went right over to this one particular chair, stroked the seat and said Jesus. It made me think of a story I had heard about Jesus actually using the carpentry shops inside the temple (Lowell used to work at the Timp temple--who knew they had shops like that?). Who's to say He didn't make that chair? It was a simple chair but well crafted. Hmmm . . .My Davey boy and I also had a nice moment in the sealing room where I pointed the mirrors out to him and how they went on forever. I told him his mom and dad were married in a room like this and so our family is forever. I asked him if he wanted to get married in the temple too and was very sure he did. Sweet boy. I debated on bringing them to the open house, and though I felt a bit rushed and nervous they weren't going to be behaved, I am still glad that we did. There are only so many opportunities they will have to see a temple as a youth (usually only adults use the main portions of the temple) and I hope somewhere in their hearts they will remember and set that as a priority in their lives. So we rushed out and were loading the bus but of course I wanted a photo. I took one and it looked really weird but it was so bright I couldn't tell for sure. Today was very sunny and between that light and the reflecting light off of the snow I totally washed out the pic. I played with it a little and this is the best I could get.
I still can't really figure out what happened, pictures later today were fine. It is almost like the temple itself is glowing. You can make out Lowell and the boys, the bus on the left, the church house on the right and just barely the Angel Moroni spire in the upper left center. But you can't see the temple itself at all. Strange but also kind of cool.

Here's one the bus gal took for us, same thing.

So then we headed over to Discovery Gateway, a children's museum in Salt Lake. We have been planning to visit for a while and today seemed like a good day to go. Even with a coupon it was $25 for the 4 of us, but only $65 for 6 months or $95 for the year. I hated to shell out the big bucks but I wasn't going to pay $25 for a one hour visit either so now we have a whole year of fun ahead of us! Trick's on them, if anyone can abuse a season pass, it is me. And the boys loved it! Carter got up way to early and was pretty edgy and hard to remove from the museum but other than that it was pleasant. I can certainly see the boys spending a lot of time there.

Playing in the "beehive"--they could send balls going in lots of directions using different tools.

Carter playing at the water table

Best of all--a real full sized helicopter. Yep, that was a hit.

My little pilots.

Busy, busy. Plus I had a Dr. appt and now 14 hours of work so it is a full day. Saturday we had a much better visit to the zoo than the previous one with no accidents and happy boys. Sunday Carter stayed in sunbeams for the whole class portions, hooray! Davis stayed with me in nursery and was oddly well behaved (not complaining!) but neither of them would even enter the sharing time room. Oh well, all in time. We had Lowell's family up Sunday night to not watch the Super Bowl--really it was to watch it but no one did, we just used the excuse to eat bad food and visit. We did catch the last 10 minutes or so which I always say is the only part worth watching. We recorded it to go back and watch the commercials too--just too much fun eating and chatting to worry about it.

Tomorrow we'll go to Jumping Jack's and Wednesday is shopping for the trip and starting packing. Fun times.