Our Big Utah Adventure: Installment 2

On our second day in Utah, we filled as much of our time as possible. We started off the morning with a trip to BYU. What visit to a university would be complete without a photo shoot with the mascot? Notably missing from the shoot was our eldest son who, having received too little sleep the previous two nights, was having a bit of a tantrum over being asked to forfeit my phone before he was able to win a car video game on said phone.

Across the street from the football stadium, I spotted the museum of paleontology. Whilst planning our vacation back home, I had hoped to do some dinosaur bone viewing since Utah has such an abundance of them. Sam has been really into reading about dinosaurs lately, and I also have found our reading to be quite interesting. Having never seen any dinosaur fossils myself, I thought it would be something we both would enjoy. So, since BYU's museums are free, we wasted no time scooting on over to check it out. It was, indeed, very cool and I had hopes of snapping some fun pictures of the boys with the dinosaurs. They were quite unwilling participants. I kept darting around after them, requesting them to "hold still", "smile", and, to Paul's horror, "stand underneath that dinosaur" (apparently he thinks you aren't supposed to go around the velvet ropes). What happened next is something straight out of an episode of Curious George. We had come to the last little room which contained several glass cases of various fossils and dinosaur whatnot, as well as a complete skeleton of a giant ground sloth. Paul was already making his way toward to exit, but suddenly the boys were in perfect position for a fun picture, so quickly I tried to hop around the sloth. I guess I must have bumped the poor guy with my bag or something, because all of a sudden I hear something crashing to the ground. As a sickly gasp escaped my throat, I saw the sloth's finger tumbling across the floor! We took that to indicate that our visit to the museum was complete. But for the rest of the day, Nathanael kept asking me, "remember when you broke the dinosaur bones?" Yes, yes I do.

After that, we toured around BYU a bit more, looking for more stuff to destroy. We took the boys to the bookstore, where they and I could have spent the remainder of our day. Sam immediately spotted a world map poster showing each of the temples that he desperately wanted. I had to pull him away from it and promise him that we would think about it and that they couldn't possibly sell the entire stack before we came back to buy one. He asked for that poster every single day the entire week. Unbeknownst to him, I went back and bought it in the next day or two, but it was a handy bribe during the week to tell him that we would only buy the poster if he behaved. We bought some delicious BYU fudge, and the boys each got their own bag with a few candies as well. Amazingly, they shared with each other very sweetly. Then Paul showed them around some of his old buildings, including the biology building which houses 15 live aquariums in the basement, filled with neat sea creatures.

 

That afternoon, it was time for Sam's first day of soccer camp. Within moments of our arrival at BYU's indoor practice facility, Sam paired off with a little boy named Saxon. They started playing right away and became quick friends. Saxon happened to be 5 as well, and they just happened to be put into the same group for the week. I was so happy for Sam, and I hope that his ease of making friends continues throughout his life. He really had a blast at camp and would even say that was his favorite part of our trip.

 

But our day was not over yet. We decided to drive the boys by the Provo Temple and let them walk around it a bit. As soon as we all unloaded from the car, however, our interest in being there plummeted. It was just so darn hot! So, we decided to end our day with a trip up to Bridal Veil Falls, where we all cooled ourselves in the icy cool snow melt cascading out of the mountains. The boys literally would have stayed and splashed around in that water for hours, given the chance.