What a week! It feels good to finally catch my breath. I'll spare you from giving you all the details, and just stick to the highlights.

To start the week off we were able to go with Ginny and her parents to the Draper temple to do the temple work for her brother Charlie. What an incredible experience! The spirit was so strong witnessing to me once again how important family is and how powerful the bonds are that connect us.
Also this week my sister Nora was in town. I love the family time we get when she comes to town. She stayed with us Sunday night and of course we stayed up till all hours of the night talking! And who can forget our unique camping experience over the weekend. I'll tell you about that later.
Also, one of my mission companions came to town this week from Texas. Audrey and I were actually companions twice on the mission, in the MTC and then again about half way through our mission. So we got together with Randall, Schellenburg and Bonner and stayed at Hogi yogi until they had to kick us out cause they were closing! It was soooo good to see them and catch up!


One of the other highlights of the week was our family camping trip that turned into a sleep over at Ryan's. So, the reader's digest version is this-
We tried to camp at Murdock Basin up in the Uintah's. The weather man said it was only 30% chance of rain so we thought we would risk it. Bad choice. We were meeting everyone up there Friday after work. My family was going up earlier to have everything set up and be ready for us. We had to meet them at the trailhead parking and then would pick us up from there in the rhino and take us off roading up to the camping spot. We got there and there was no sign of them. We sat there waiting for them for over an hour. The sky kept getting darker and darker with clouds, then came rain and still no sight of them.
Little did we know what drama they were going through. They made it to the campsite and dropped off most the stuff. They broke the trailer hitch getting up there. Then on their way back down to get the rest of the stuff it started hailing and snowing on them, leaving them all soaked and their stuff drenched. When they tried to come get us in the rhino it broke down, so they tried to pull it with the truck and the rope busted.
By the time they got to us practically everything was broken, wet and freezing! Poor things!
It was almost midnight by this point and we were all starving, so we drove back to Park City, ate at Wendy's and then all crashed at Ryan and Sonja's.
And what would ya know- Saturday was bright and sunny.
We were determined to make the most of our weekend and decided to hike up to Bells Canyon.

It was a beautiful hike with a gorgeous view of a waterfall at the top and the valley below. I was especially proud of my mom for making it to the top. She just had surgery on her rotater cuff in her shoulder and was quite the trooper. There were times that we had to help her over some pretty big rocks on the path because she couldn't pull herself up and over them with her hurt arm- but I can't help but make it a comparison to life. There are times when we all need others' help to pull us up and over some of the trials we face in life, but that's why we're here and that's what family is for.

A Great Anniversary

August 4th was our 2 year anniversary! One of my clients at work hooked us up with a great hotel room at the Marriott in St. George, so we headed down there for a long weekend.

It's funny that just having cable in the hotel room was a luxury to us. Zeb was so excited because Shark Week was on, and sadly it was hard to peel him away from that. Not to mention that Cops and Cheaters was on, which are our favorite too!
We drove to Vegas on Monday to hang out on the strip. We went to the Shark Reef at the Mandalay Bay (I'm seeing a theme here of sharks-we didn't even plan that!)

They gave us these little hand held devices that you held up to your ear to hear facts about all the animals you were looking at. Well, if any of you don't know this about my husband- he knows almost everything about almost all animals! I was trying to listen to my little remote thingy but he kept telling me everything that the remote was, so eventually I just put it down and let him tell me everything about all the fish and sharks. I did manage to stump him on one fact that I heard from my remote- it was about the lionfish. To kill their prey they corner them and then use their poisonous spines to subdue their prey before swallowing them whole!

Now for any of you that don't know this about me- I absolutely love touching things. So you can imagine my sheer excitement when they had a pool full of stingrays that we could touch. I was practically pushing the little children out of my way so I could touch them as they swam by! It was awesome!

Here's a cool shot of one of the sharks. They had all different kinds of sharks- but to me they are all just ugly and scary.

At certain points they had the aquarium all around you so you could see the sharks everywhere- it was really cool!

A shark above us

Some cool jelly fish

Other than that, we ate at In and Out Burger, which surprisingly was Zeb's first time and just hung out on the strip.

In Caesars Palace


Zeb put in a dollar, he lost 98 cents, but came out on top with 2 cents left.

Most of the time we were in St. George. We swam and shopped, went to a movie, ate a lot, relaxed and visited the St. George temple.


I warned you in my last post that this one might get mushy- so feel free to stop reading now. But I must say that probably my favorite part of the trip was just getting to talk with my husband. To have one on one time that was uninterrupted by life and we could just talk! We play this game where we take turns asking each other questions, one at a time and they can be about anything. I think we played this for the entire 4 hours home. It definitely keeps things interesting and it's really fun to think up things that we normally wouldn't talk about! It still surprises me how much I can learn about Zeb and how I grow to love him more and more!