Vacation Pictures

Here are some of our pictures from our Vacation to Utah and California in May. Ephraim got himself some wheels. Fill 'er up! He loved playing with this gas pump. This and the next few are from the Children's Museum in Salt Lake City. Jaron did pretty well with this wall. If you're wondering about the green thing on the floor, it's a cabbage. Don't you take cabbage when you go rock climbing? Ephraim loading up the crane. What a hard worker! Jaron operating the big crane. He used it more for knocking things down than for building. Shocker! Some boys like construction and demolition. Simeon prefers housekeeping. For now. The boys took turns at the controls of this search and rescue helicopter. When we were visiting with a friend and left the kids with Jason's mom, here's what happened to Simeon when she couldn't find the diapers. What you don't see in this picture is the maxi-pad inside the towel - to help keep him dry. This was in our campsite at Samuel P. Taylor state park near San Francisco. This stump was about 10 feet tall. The boys climbed it without any parental assistance. However, they couldn't get down without help. That kept them out of the way during meal preparation. All of our kids, plus all of Carin's kids, all sitting down at the same time. All looking at a camera, though not all at the same one. No sedatives were administered in preparation for this picture. Simeon wearing Jason's sunglasses. Man he's hot! This was taken at Liberty Park in Salt Lake City. For those of you not in Utah, the background of this picture is the Seven Canyons Fountain, a replica of the Wasatch Front's 7 rivers and canyons, plus the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake. We had fun here for hours. Our one complete family picture from vacation. You can't see the lighthouse in the background, but it's there, and it was cute. This was taken at Point Reyes near San Francisco. We claim this beach for our family. Nobody else seemed to want to be at the beach at Point Reyes in May - Brr. A monument we erected in honor of our newly claimed beach. Jaron's running faster here than it looks. Come to think of it, he's probably never run faster!

Here's Simeon sleeping on the way home. During the day. Incredible.

Here are the other two. Sleeping. During the day. At the same time. All three at once! Not only is this very cute, but they were also very quiet. During the day! Did I say that already? All told, this was our best family vacation ever. We camped 4 different campgrounds in 3 states, covered 5,000 miles, drove for more than total 87 hours, attended one wedding, visited 2 museums, saw 8 of our boys' cousins, passed through 8 states, saw one ocean, walked down (then back up) 308 stairs to get to the Point Reyes lighthouse, drove across the Golden Gate bridge, saw 6 temples (could have been eight, but we were too lazy to drive out of our way for Fresno and Sacramento), and had an all around great time.