Vacation!

Joe and I have been working pretty hard this summer and have both been looking forward to a much needed vacation. Joe has been working days at the writing center and nights working on an e-book he and his adviser are putting together. Since my online course has been over, I have been taking care of Lizzie and helping with renovations in the apartment complex where we live. Vacation started August 5. We flew in to SLC and went to Orem to spend a week with Joe's parents. Lizzie did very well on the flights there, sleeping some and playing some and whining just a little. Here are some highlights from that part of our trip:

Emily gets a drastic change in her hairdo:


Lizzie meet lots of family:



We took Lizzie swimming:





Thanksgiving Point



The mountains! Oh the mountains! (And a beautiful Y.)


On August 12, we headed to Idaho. On the way, we stopped in SLC to visit the new Church History Library where Joe's parents work. We also walked around Temple Square to show Lizzie that beautiful edifice.


Here are some highlights from our time in Idaho.

Giving my mom a quilt that I made for her


Playing games with Mama Swen and my niece Amy


Joe did not get to stay long in Idaho. He had to go back down to Utah on the 14 and then fly out on the 15 (Saturday). He had to work the following Monday. The great news is that in the morning before his flight, he went to a comic book signing with Chris Claremont who in the past wrote for the X-men for 15 years. Considering Joe is writing his dissertation on the X-men, this was a great opportunity to create a potential network for future contacts.

After Joe left, Lizzie and I stayed a few more days in Idaho.

More family came in to town.




I spent some time with some great friends. We all had babies within 3 months of each other: Lizzie, Macey, and Hayden. Lizzie is the oldest.


Although I don't know that I'll ever live in a town as small as Paul, Idaho again, I still love going back home and feeling the peace of a quiet countryside. You just don't get many better views of the Magic Valley than from my mom's front yard.


All in all, we had a great time. We love our family and spending time with them. We're sorry it was so short! This was our first vacation with Lizzie. Although we realize that once a parent, always a parent, even when on vacation, we had hoped that vacation would mean more sleeping in and taking naps. Maybe next time.....

Lizzie and the remote control car

She's not crawling yet, but she can get around.

Nauvoo trip

On July 7th and 8th Emily and I found ourselves down in Nauvoo, Illinois. We had a few reasons for making our way there, which I'll recount here:

1) Nauvoo is a Mormon church history site that I had never visited, and Emily had only been to once. While we're here in Michigan we're in reasonably close proximity to several church history sites, and we haven't taken as good advantage of this situation as we probably should have.

2) Emily's mom and her brother Scott and his family were going to be in Nauvoo at those dates, so we could see some of her family and they could meet Lizzie for the first time. They also have a son we had not seen who is a few months older than Lizzie.

3) We needed to steal Emily's mom's car, and this seemed like as good a chance as any we were likely to get. You see, come September Emily's mom will be coming out to live near us for a few months (really, really near to us, in the same apartment complex). She's going to help us out as we are both beginning our dissertations. She'll watch Lizzie some every day so both Emily and I can get several quality hours of school work done. This will be a huge blessing for us, as we both need the time to get a good initial push into this final stage of our PhD programs. While she is here, she needs to have a car. There were several options for her to get her car out here, but in the end this trip to Nauvoo seemed to be the best choice. She drove out with her car loaded with some belongings, we met her in Nauvoo and drove her car back to Michigan, and she rode back to Idaho with Scott and his family. Emily and I aren't really certain how we can repay her mom for the generosity of coming out here, but we are really thankful that she's doing this for us.

So, with those reasons for going to Nauvoo, we finally made a trip there. Emily, Lizzie, and I rode on a train to Chicago, then to a city that is only a few minutes outside of Nauvoo. This was our first trip with Lizzie, and the train was a pretty low stress way to travel (we're flying back to Utah this week, so that will be a different experience). The seats were quite spacious, and when Lizzie got fussy I was able to walk up and down the aisles with her. Also, she was interested in the scenery flying by:


Here's Lizzie in Chicago holding up a couple skyscrapers:


And here we are in front of the Nauvoo temple:


Lizzie, Emily, and her mom in front of a statue of Joseph and Hyrum Smith:


This is the room above The Red Brick Store where many early church meetings took place:



We walked around the city, which is right on the Mississippi River:



People often note that Lizzie has some big blue eyes, and this picture shows them off a bit:


Not only did we visit Nauvoo, we also visited Carthage, Illinois before coming back to Michigan. Carthage is where Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were martyred: