After all the partying and events over the last few days, we are all beat! That said, we decided to stay a day longer, rest, and do nothing. We all got our hair cut from Carla and Ben got a buzz cut. It is really cute, but it’s really weird to see him with no hair! 😐 Right now we’re trying to get ourselves mentally prepared for the LONG drive back home over the next two days!
Today, Mark gave his homecoming talk at church, which was wonderful. As part of the program, all the kids and grand-kids got up on the stand and sang Called to Serve in Spanish! 😐 It was crazy! What also was very interesting is that the speaker that spoke with Mark had a family visiting him from Denmark (that he baptized on his mission). It turns out that they were in the Smiley’s ward in Copenhagen and Angela met them when she was over there!!! SMALL WORLD! They had a reunion of sorts and then the family came over to visit tonight.
After the meetings were over, we all went over to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house and had a huge dinner/welcome-home reception for Mark. The funny thing was that at this reception, it was almost like a Weber High School reunion! One of Mark’s companions, Elder Hales, was there with his family. Elder Hales’ dad is a year or two older than me and we were at Weber High together! Again, SMALL WORLD! In addition, Elder Hales’ mom, is also a Weber High grad and is a year younger than me. Her brother (Eric), and his brother (Will) were friends of mine, and I played soccer for years with “Uncle Will” Hales. To top that off, Angela’s cousin, Scott Burns was there, and he graduated from Weber High as well and is the same age as Elder Hales’ dad! 🙂 It was pretty funny. It was nice to catch up with all of them and talk about the good-old-days!
Today was Zach’s big baptism day. He has been looking forward to this day for a long time and couldn’t wait! He got up really early and wanted to know if it was time yet! 🙂 We had to laugh about that one. We hope he is that excited to be good all the time going forward! We met at the church in Salmon, and Zach was baptized and confirmed at 11. All the family was there and it was a wonderful experience!
The spirit was really strong there and we had the whole family there with us. We missed having our ward friends and neighbors there with us, but they all understood when we told them that Zach would be baptized out West. It’s really amazing how fast time flies! We only have one left to baptize. It seems like only yesterday that little Sarah was baptized, and now it’s about 6 weeks before she goes out to Provo to BYU. Sniff sniff… 🙁
After Zach’s baptism, we had a big family party out at Scott and Carla’s. Greg was there and took family pictures of everyone and they turned out really great!
We then had a huge milk can meal that everyone loved. Along with that, we had a ton of other food, and also had a birthday celebration for Zach and Austin.
A bunch of the kids finished out the afternoon riding on Carla’s and Scott’s horses. Other than being baptized, that was Zach’s favorite part of the day. He just loved it!
Tonight we saw some of the craziest things ever. We went to the annual Salmon demolition derby. We were all excited, because the family had entered a car in the event. The event started off with insane kids on motorcycles trying to pop balloons on each other’s heads. I can’t even write about how crazy it was.
After that, it was time for the main event and the first heat of the demolition derby started. Our car came out and we cheered like crazy.
It got rammed all over the place and had to be pulled off (not a very big car)…
It kept coming back out and coming back out after work on it, and it made it to the final heat! We couldn’t believe it. The thing wouldn’t quit! It was by far the smallest car out there for the final heat and obviously wouldn’t win, but it was fun. During the “halftime” show, another group of crazy kids, this time on 4-wheelers, came out and did the balloon popping thing again! This was even more dangerous than on the motorcycles…
The cars then came out, and after it was all over, our car wouldn’t even run any more. The axle was broken down into the ground, and it was smashed to bits.
What a crazy night! I’m sure we’ll talk about this day for many years to come. 🙂
Today was a really busy party day as well! Salmon had their Salmon River Days 4th of July parade today so we went to that. It was pretty busy, and at this time of the year, I swear, the town doubles in size. 🙂 The parade was fun to watch. It’s a very small town parade with lots of horses, tractors, demolition derby cars, stuff like that. It’s no where near the “commercialized” versions of the parades we have out in Chicago, which was a breath of fresh air. 🙂
After the parade, we wandered around main street and enjoyed the festivities. Zach got to learn how to be a detective and fingerprint people, there were a lot of local things for sale, and Angela enjoyed a quilt show (not Zach’s, mine, or Ben’s cup of tea, but she liked it). 🙂 The quilt show was in the room where we had our wedding reception up in Salmon over 21 years ago!!! I had to take a picture of Angela outside the building for posterity’s sake. She’s even more beautiful now than she was then! 🙂
After we tired ourselves out from all that, we went over to David and Gina’s house for a fun-filled afternoon of food and water. It’s Gina’s birthday today and to celebrate, they had turned their backyard into a water park.
Everyone totally wore themselves out getting wet, playing volleyball and football, and eating a ton of great food! David and Gina have a GREAT yard that’s really big, and Angela was totally jealous! She’s always wanting more yard and where we live now, it’s not too likely. With every square foot of house and yard, the property taxes go through the roof. 🙁
We’re really tired now so it’s off to bed!
Today was Zach’s big eighth birthday! Happy Birthday little man!!!
Zach’s morning started off with a cinnamon roll with candles from Grandma. He laughed when he saw it. Grandmas like to do things like that! 🙂
He then opened all his presents and really liked that. He got his first set of “big boy” scriptures that he carried around with him much of the day. It was funny to watch. He’s very excited for his baptism on Saturday and can’t wait for that.
Tonight we had a hot dog roast and everybody joined in. All of my family came up and is joining us for the weekend for Zach’s baptism as well, so we have quite the crowd. We all sang to Zach and had lots of food and fun.
Today we left North Ogden and traveled up to Salmon Idaho. Brittany drove most of the way which was GREAT! She’s racking up the hours so she can get her license! 🙂
When we got to Salmon, we had a relaxing afternoon (at least for most of us)! 🙂 Some never relax and are always going 100 miles per hour! We had a hot dog roast and Carla threw a surprise birthday party for Angela’s 40th birthday! She made a big cheesecake that tasted wonderful!
After that, we flung water balloons for the kids to catch in towels and had some great laughs watching that!
Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Today was crazy busy! We started off the day making our way down to Salt Lake City, visiting my uncle Marv along the way. He hasn’t been doing so well lately and is pretty sick. It was nice to see the family. We haven’t seen them in probably 12 years. That’s one of the drawbacks of living so far away… When you do come out to see family, it’s usually immediate family and there isn’t much time to travel around seeing all the extended family you’d like to see.
We then went down to Salt Lake to spend the day. We were going to go see Cliff Higbee (my Regional Leadership Forum leader) at the Church Offices but missed him. We went to the top of the Church Office building and the kids thought that was really cool. Brittany had been up there before and remembered a little bit, and Kirstyn had gone up when she was a baby, but the boys never had. We also got pictures taken at the same place that Angela and I had our wedding pictures taken 21 years ago!
We then walked around Temple Square for a bit and then went over to the Conference Center where we listened to an organ recital of one of the Tabernacle Choir Organists. It was really good and Kirstyn loved it so much, she took her program down afterward and had him sign it. 🙂
We took the full tour of the Conference Center (something we had not had the chance to do yet), and it was very fascinating. It’s amazing how far engineering has come to build something like that.
After the tour, we rushed over to the mall and had a quick bite to eat before high-tailing it to the airport to see Mark come home from his mission. We went to the baggage area that we were told to go to, but they ended coming in at a different terminal so I’m sure that Mark and the other Elder he came home with were pretty confused when no one was there! 🙂 They finally found us, and the reunion was very large and loud! It was good to see Mark and he had a great and successful mission.
After the airport, we went to Grandma Burns for a smaller reunion. It was really funny… She wouldn’t even hug Mark because he was still a missionary. 🙂 We had a good laugh over that! We also got the yearly 4 Sarah picture taken.
We are really tired and ready to hit the sack now! We’ll sleep great tonight!
Today we had a relaxing day in North Ogden. We were pretty tired from our travels and the last couple of days in the Denver area, so it was nice to relax. We all went and saw the movie Brave, came back and kicked back and ended the day with a family back yard BBQ. Yum!
Today we got up and attended church today at the Liddell’s ward. I purposefully wore a colored shirt to church becuase I could, and Terry Liddell laughed when he saw me. He asked me if it was rebellion Sunday, to which I agreed! 🙂 Their ward was nice although about half the ward was gone on vacation and such. I wanted to go see Steve Graves (who works for me) and his family as well, who live here in Castle Rock, but they had all gone on vacation as well. 🙁
After church, we had some lunch and then took off for the 9 hour drive to Ogden, Utah to see my family. The kids, as usual, did really well again. They slept a lot so that was nice. Angela and I got to have some nice conversation. 🙂
By the time we got to Ogden, we were ready to go to bed, so we ate a bunch, and then crashed. It was great to see Mom and Dad/Grandma and Grandpa Halliday again. It’s been awhile. That’s the hard thing about living out where we do. We don’t get to see family near as much as we’d like.
Today we got up early (some probably due to the time change) and got a start on a busy but very fun day. We toured all through Castle Rock and saw about everything you could see. We really like it here, especially the weather (dry but not too hot). There is a huge fire burning south of hear near Colorado Springs so you could smell some of the smoke and the mountains were a little obscured from the haze.
We hiked up Castle Rock (hence the name of the city) and looked out over the valley. It really brings back memories of being out west! 🙁 We sure miss it.
While on our hike we took a lot of pictures of each other, the scenery, and we even got some great shots of wildlife…
Yes, the picture above is real. It’s a zoom shot of the nesting area. You could hear the babies wanting their mom as she squawked as well. Pretty cool!
We are going to get some good sleep tonight! 🙂
Today we left for our summer vacation/family reunion/baptism event/college prep trip. 🙂 We decided to leave a couple days earlier and today, we started off early and drove to Denver. We will be staying until Sunday afternoon with the Liddell family, our friends from the Naperville 2nd Ward who moved to Denver back in February. The drive went well and the kids were really good. We are so blessed to have kids who don’t whine and cry on trips! 🙂
We arrived in Denver this evening and it was good to see the Liddell’s and catch up with them on how things have been since they moved. We have a fun-filled and packed day tomorrow, so we’ll get some sleep! 🙂
Well, EFY is now over and I drove down to Normal IL to pick up Brittany and some other folks that went down. That’s one of my favorite things to do. It’s great driving back home listening to all the fun stories and such from the kids. 🙂 The only thing I don’t like is getting up and leaving at 4:30am to get down there to pick them up at 7am. 🙂
After we got home, I took a rest, cleaned a bit, and then we drove downtown for a little kayaking adventure and Cirque du Soleil entertainment. Angela had found a Groupon for kayaking on the Chicago river for a really good deal, so 6 of us got tickets and went.
It was a lot of fun. This was Angela’s first time in a kayak and so she and I got a tandem one. The kayaking was actually an architecture tour while on the Chicago river. We would paddle around the river, stop at specific places, and our guide would tell us about the buildings and such. I had been on an architecture tour before, but not this way. The kayaking was awesome (as long you don’t fall into the river which is really gross and dirty). 🙂
It was actually pretty good exercise! We were out on the river for almost 4 hours! We think we’ll do that again! Only one person ended up swamping his kayak and that was because he thought he was really cool and was goofing around. Some people are just not the sharpest tool in the shed. We about gagged when he went under. 🙂
After our kayaking adventure, we drove over to Navy Pier and went to a great performance from Cirque du Soleil. It was called Cirque Shanghai: Year of the Dragon. It was really cool and we had a great time! The acrobatics and balancing acts were amazing! It was really cool and crazy at the same time. Who would think to have 6 motorcycles going around and around a metal sphere at the same time without hitting each other.
After the performance, we walked around for awhile and tried to find something to eat for dinner. We were all pretty hungry. Navy Pier was totally crammed with people, so we decided to walk back toward the lots where we parked to find something. We ended up eating in a hotel restaurant but it was really good. Maybe it was because we were so hungry. 🙂 We got home pretty late and after getting up at 4 to get ready to leave, I was totally ready to crash! 🙂 What a great day, though!!!
