Family Time!

So, Nathanael got married yesterday. It was wonderful. It's been over two years since we've had a wedding in the family. And can I tell you how different it is being in the groom's family instead of the bride's? Totally different. Major brownie points for Nathanael & Alisha for being so laid back and easy going about the whole thing, too.

 They're great, we adore them.

Anyway.

They got married in the temple at Nauvoo, Illinois. And we decided to make a mini-vacation of it all. So we went over Nauvoo the day before the wedding, and got a hotel room, and took the kids swimming, gave them each a fiver and let them loose in the gift shop, dinked around town for a little bit. Nothing huge, mind you. But the kids felt like a million bucks. They loved it. Hooray for family time! It seems like we are always busy doing stuff and going different directions, and we never just hang out as a family, so it was great to be together. At the end of the day, every one of them resoundingly proclaimed thanks for road trips and family time. Here are some photos of our little slice of quality time together:

Hyrum's cannonball dive...the pool was only 5 feet deep at the deepest, and he enjoyed showing off how tall he was by standing around in the deep end and taunting his shorter sisters.

Yvette loves swimming, and having a shallow enough shallow end makes her feel like a mermaid.

George mostly threw the football at Mark and Hyrum, and ran around the pool jumping up and down. He isn't too keen on the water unless someone is holding him or he has a flotation device.

Eliza swam and swam and swam and swam. She is practicing so much, she wants to be a good swimmer.

Gabba wishes she lived in a pool. She pesters me about every day: "Mom, can we go swimming?"

Hyrum's impression of a sea otter...a really big sea otter that needs to shave it's mustache...

Mark - who doesn't care much for swimming and pools - played with his water babies and had a great time in spite of the fact that he was swimming in a pool.

Lucy's super active imagination doesn't stop for a minute. She had a make-believe game going the whole hour-and-a-half we were in the pool.

No, George, you can't get in the hot tub...even if there wasn't an age limit, there is a mischief limit.

Mark and the Water Phoglets (I was pool-side with Aurora and the camera)

Yvette discovered that she can make cheese sculptures with the wire cheese cutter. Here is the Artist with her Cheese-and-Cracker creations.

Yes, we drove four hours and shelled out the cash for a hotel room so my kids could lounge on a couch in their pjs and watch tv...

Don't look so surprised! Of course Mark changes diapers. And he is super speedy and efficient about it, too. 

Here are my girls with the massive magnolia blossoms that were laying around on the grass at the visitors' center in Nauvoo. They wanted to carry them around all day and use the petals at the wedding and be flower girls. This lasted about fifteen minutes until they found something more interesting and promptly ditched the flowers. 

The residents of the House of Phogles posing with one of the sun stones of the original Nauvoo temple. I think this is only the second photo of all of us together since Aurora got here five months ago.

Here is the rope-making demonstration at the Family Living Center. Hyrum got to keep the rope. The girls were disappointed that they didn't get to actually make a candle at the candle-making demonstration. But everyone got a "prairie diamond" ring at the blacksmith's shop, and Lucy scored the mini horseshoe. And of course, we got a Nauvoo brick. 

And then it was time to rush back to the hotel, change into our wedding finery, pack like crazy, check out of our "family suite," and high-tail it to the temple. We had a lovely mini-vacation, short as it was, but now it was wedding time!