Natural History Museum

This week I took the kids to the new Natural History Museum at the U of U on their free day.  It was incredible!  We spent several hours there before the kids were tired, and we didn't even get to see everything.  I especially loved their gems and minerals exhibit, which I didn't think to take a picture of.  Oops.  

Duckbill dinosaur footprint

The dinosaur exhibit was impressive!

Some kind of giant prehistoric alligator

They had a neat display of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks that you could touch.  It made me think fondly of my days taking Geology 101.  Ha ha.

Animal displays  

Maggie really wanted a picture by these skulls.  Ha ha.

We will definitely plan to go back next summer!  It was AMAZING.

Happy 4th of July!

It's hard to get a good picture of all the kids in their flag shirts...

We had a fun holiday weekend.  We spent a fun day with my mom on the 3rd in her air-conditioned house (ours was STILL broken at that time) and played some games and watched movies.  We went out to dinner at Zupas.

Then on the 4th, we had a fun BBQ with the Stouts and some extended family, complete with homemade root beer and homemade ice cream.  YUM! Then we came home and had our own little fireworks show with my mom in our driveway.  It was a blast.

Aquarium

This past year we had an annual pass to our local aquarium.  We have absolutely LOVED it and have totally gotten our money's worth.  Our pass has now expired, but here are a few pictures to remember it by.  

Evelyn loved the turtles!

Peaches, the anaconda, is behind Jared

Poor family picture in front of the caimans (small alligators).  Ha ha. You can see one by Alan's head.

Goliath bird-eating tarantula  Yuck.

Big fish

Maggie peeking

Everyone loved playing on the rope bridge

Maggie is taller than the emperor penguins

Jared and the penguins.  Our last few times visiting the aquarium, we got to see some baby penguins!

Evelyn checks out a coral reef

Evelyn in front of the shark tank

 The aquarium has an amazing three-level, indoor playground.  Sometimes we would drive to the aquarium and spend most of our time just playing on the playground!

Maggie up so high!

Evy peeking through the mesh on a bridge

We will miss our pass to the aquarium, but we will be getting a pass to another fun place soon!

Outdoor summer fun

We had a crazy, busy month of June.  We went tons of fun places, had 2 weeks of swimming lessons at the rec center, and went swimming a lot at Grandma Curtis' pool.  

Oh, yeah, and our air conditioner in our house was broken, for like half of the month.  We had it repaired a couple of times only to have it break down again several days later with a DIFFERENT problem.  Well, we finally decided to replace the whole darn thing, but the a/c company was out a week to put it in, so we had to survive the hottest June week on record (for like the last 100+ years) with no a/c!!  Our house got up to 90-92 every day.  It was MISERABLE, and I was super cranky the whole time.  We had fans blowing, but they were noisy and only mildly helpful.  (By the way, new a/c's are extremely expensive--I hope no one reading this has to get a new one anytime soon!)

Despite hot days in our house, here are some of the fun outdoor things we did:

We went to This is the Place State Park on a free day and enjoyed free ice cream cones:

In front of the Brigham Young house

Evy petting a goat

Jared petting the chicken named Lunch

Maggie petting Lunch

We rode the ponies

We rode the mini train

Jared and Maggie panned for "gold"

We have also been up the canyon next to our house for a couple of picnics and campfires.  One time we went up with our friends the Hamiltons in our ward, and another time we went with Alan's sister Rachel and her husband Justin.

Maggie looked so cute in her skinny jeans that I can never get her to wear except when we are up the canyon.

We are lucky to have a couple of splash pads close to our house, so on days where we don't go swimming in Grandma's pool, we often go to one of them.

I'm still trying to work on Maggie looking at the camera...Can you tell by all the pictures in this post?

 We went one afternoon to a local carnival and enjoyed the rides and the churros.  Even Evelyn was big enough to go on many of the rides!

Alan took these pictures of Evy on one of our neighborhood "cookie walks."  Once a month on Sunday evenings, a few houses host cookies on their driveways, and then families can walk around and visit with neighbors while they eat a cookie or two (or three, or four...)

Videos from June and July

We've been having fun teaching Evelyn to say things and then having her repeat them like a parrot.  Recently after watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the old one, of course), we taught her to say, "You get nothing!  You lose!  Good day, sir!"

Maggie wanted to learn the words to the song "Clementine" and of course Evelyn picked up on it, too. What cute girls I have.  (Apparently I like to take videos of Evelyn while she's eating dinner...)