Family Vacation

After a highly stressful semester and not placing a foot out of Rexburg or Idaho Falls for months, we decided to take a very much needed family vacation this last weekend!

We went to Salt Lake City, Utah!  I know it's not that exciting for some, but we didn't want to travel too far and we still wanted a place that had some fun stuff to do so Salt Lake was the perfect destination for us!

We left Friday morning and our first stop was the Gateway Mall in downtown SLC.  We walked around, looked in a bunch of stores, had lunch and just enjoyed the beautiful weather and water fountains.  Afterwards, we headed to our hotel and went swimming for quite awhile.  This was Kyla's favorite part of the vacation I think!  She is definitely not afraid of water and loved jumping in and floating all by herself in her swimming ring. 

 

  

After we were done swimming, we walked back to our room.  She looks so cute wrapped up in the little towel!

 We then went to Denny's for dinner and went back to the hotel to watch a few movies before we all passed out. 

 

Sitting at Denny's Restaurant

That night was a little rough for all of us seeing as Kyla was up coughing for a few hours and couldn't go back to sleep and the beds weren't as comfortable as we hoped for a pregnant woman. :)  The hotel was awesome though and we'll definitely stay there again.

 

At our hotel room

Even though we were still tired the next day, we went swimming again in the morning after breakfast, got ready and left to go to the Discovery Gateway Childrens Museum.  It was so awesome and Kyla loved every bit of it!  We took probably a hundred pictures of her at the museum exploring everything!  Here are a few of her favorite activities:

 

They had a cute little miniature shopping center (perfect size for kids) where they could put all kinds of pretend food in their baskets and then use the cash register to check out.  Kyla had so much fun!

 

She also enjoyed making sandwiches at the shopping center too. :)

  

They had a fun little play house with a small sized kitchen and living room.  Kyla enjoyed setting up the table and pretending to eat her snacks.  They even had a pretend fridge door you could open with food inside, as well as a stove and cupboards!  It was awesome!

 She also enjoyed playing dress up with a bunch of costumes they had around the museum.  Here she is dressed up as a cow.  She also dressed up as a fish, a yellow bird, a cowgirl, and a construction worker!

The museum also had a "ball" area where the kids could put balls into different holes, air suctions, and other things.  She had so much fun and honestly probably could have spent most of her time in here!  If you've never been to this place, I highly recommend taking your children here!  It's awesome!

Besides what you see in the pictures, there was also a water play place where kids could put balls in the water, or their hands or whatever, a farm area where they had pretend chickens they could put away in their coops and a lifesize horse they could pretend to play on.  They had a small climbing wall, building activities, drawing centers, magnet building, puzzles, etc.  Kyla probably played with everything there at least once!

We then left for a lunch break and was planning on going to the Aquarium in Sandy, UT but we were all so tired that we decided to opt out on that and took Kyla back to the Museum to enjoy it a bit longer instead.  We were kind of sad that we missed the Aquarium but we'll have plenty of opportunities to go again. Besides, it saved us money and some travel time so it was worth it!

After we spent another hour or 2 at the museum we saw a bunny at the Build A Bear Workshop as we were heading out.  Kyla called it the Easter Bunny and she was so excited to take a picture with her.  She gave her hugs and a high five!

As we were heading back to where our car was parked, we walked to Temple Square and showed Kyla the temple and the "BIG Jesus" statue (as Kyla called it). 

She loved looking up at it and loved looking at the planets and stars that surrounded him too.  We then walked back to our car and headed home.  Kyla ended up falling asleep in the car within about 10 minutes and slept most of the way. 

 

(Watching a movie on our portable DVD player in the car after she woke up)

We all went to bed early that night and even got to sleep in a little!  Kyla is still making up for lost sleep time.  Oh well....she was perfect through our vacation and it was so worth all the fun and exhaustion!

Lastly, for all our friends over there in Utah, sorry we didn't have time to visit with you!  We wanted to make this a family only event but we did think of you and really wanted to see all of you.  Honestly, if we made the time to come visit all of our friends who are down there right now, it would have taken us the whole weekend!  Hyrum has mission buddies who he has been wanting to get together with forever and I have some very close, dear and best friends who I would have been soooo very excited to see!  Especially since one just had a baby, it was my best friends birthday, and another one had a baby while we were there!  Anyway, since I know all of you down in Utah read our blog, we hope you'll forgive us for not visiting this time!  We love you lots though and I'm hoping we'll make it down there again soon to visit!

Cheers, for a wonderful much needed trip together as a family...it definitely created some great memories and bonding time!