Brigham City Temple Open House

Like many others in our area, we had the opportunity to take our girls to the open house for the Brigham City Utah LDS Temple. We took Bridget to a temple open house a couple of years ago, but she was too little to remember going, so it was fun to have her be a little bit older this time around. Hopefully she got a sense of how beautiful they are as well as a bit of an understanding of what goes on inside. She's seen pictures of the insides of various temples in a magazine we have at home, so she was quick to let me know that she already knew what to expect.

It was a beautiful, hot day, so we got in and out of the hot parking garage where are the pre and post-tour stuff happened. Felicity was super wiggley so trying to get good pictures on the temple grounds was no easy task. She did enjoy looking at all the pictures of Jesus in the temple and the animals in some of the scenic murals. When I asked Bridget what she liked best, she said everything was her favorite.

We are so fortunate to have yet another temple so close to us and to be able to share this experience with our children.

My Summer Project

I'm one of those people that always has a list of "projects" I'd like to accomplish in my spare time. Some of them sit on that list for a long time because daily life and other things usually are a higher priority. This summer, I decided to tackle a project that's been on that list for about 5.5 years now. It was about that long ago that we acquired some old furniture from my parents' house, including a bedroom set consisting of 2 large chests of drawers and a nightstand. They had an oak finish which I do not prefer, and the hardware was in need of some updating. It took me about 6 weeks from start to finish to do all 3 pieces, but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. The worst part of it was stripping the old finish off. It was a messy, smelly job that was then followed by a light sanding. I used a gel stain (only because the color I liked best only came that way), and it took 10-12 hours to dry in between coats which was partly why it took me so long. I had to do 3 coats, but the difficulty was that the sides and top were a veneer and didn't absorb the stain as well. Most of the veneer took 4 coats.

Here's a before shot of one of the dressers.

Here's what the drawers looked like after just one coat. The bottom drawer is the bare wood.
And here's the finished product. It really looks much better in person - especially since our camera is not the greatest.

Here's the other dresser (sorry no before shot).

And here's the nightstand.

It certainly took much longer to do this than I originally anticipated, but I'm very pleased with the end result. And I'm happy to check this off my project list.

Kimberly's Birthday

Nate knows birthdays are a big deal to me, and since he botched Mother's Day this year, I think he felt the need to make it up to me for my birthday. He did a pretty good job too - especially since the celebration lasted more than one day.

Several months ago, we found out that the musical Wicked was coming back to Salt Lake again. Since we weren't able to get tickets the last time it was here, we were happy to find out that Nate had access to buying tickets before the general public since his employer is a sponser. And we also found out it would be here around my birthday. Happy birthday to me!

We ended up going to the Saturday matinee a couple of days beforehand because we figured it would be easier to leave our kiddos that way. Luckily, my sister Emily happened to be in town with her family, so we were able to leave our kids with her and most of the Williams family at Jennine's house. Wicked was awesome!

As a little surprise on my birthday, Nate and Bridget snuck out while Felicity and I were still sleeping and went to get us Chunky Cinnamon French Toast from Kneaders. We love breakfast at our house, and that French Toast is one of my favorites.

Nate also knows how much I love cake, so he decided he was going to make my cake himself this year (and from scratch I might add). The finished product not only turned out beautiful, but it tasted as good as it looked. Apparently he's learned a thing or two from watching me make cakes so many times.This was the best picture we could get of the three of us together. Felicity just wanted to stick her little hand in the cake so badly as you can tell from the look on her face and her stretched out arm.For dinner, we went and got Zupa's and brought it home to enjoy with the cake and ice cream. We love that place, so it made for a great end to a great birthday.

Random Summer Fun

Our kids LOVE to be outside, so we spend a lot of time out there every day. And Bridget's got quite the farmer tan to prove it. Here's a little of the fun we've been having this summer.
Our neighbors gave us this playhouse a couple of summers ago, and it's gotten plenty of use since then. In the spring Felicity would mostly just go in and out of the door, but now she loves climbing the steps and going down the slide all by herself.

Lots of hot days means lots of fun in the pool. They both love the water, and even Felicity loves taking turns going down the slide and into the pool.

We've gotten the slip and slide out a couple of times too, but they seem to prefer the pool.

Most of our time outside is actually spent in the front yard so that Bridget can ride her bike around and around the cul-de-sac. She never seems to tire of it, and it makes me realize how nice it is to live in a very quiet cul-de-sac so she can ride around to her heart's content.

Oh, how we love summer!