Laura's Birthday

A few weeks ago we celebrated Laura's 5th birthday. She wanted a princess party and a princess cake. And she wanted to go to the mall, ride the carousel and have a pretzel. And she wanted pizza for dinner with her grandmas and grandpas. She was easy to please and we had a fun day!

I'm constantly thinking I hope Laura knows how much we love her. She is such a sweetheart with so much personality. She loves to do her hair, write notes and draw pictures, and see her friends. I love the way she says, "you're the best," the way she runs in the kitchen to help when I start cooking, the way she poses for the camera, and the way she says "show" instead of "sure" when I ask her to do things. She's a great big (and little) sister and we love her very much!

More Yellowstone Pictures

Nate is big into looking for birds. We were both excited to spot this one.

We were also excited to see three bears in the wild on the trip.

This was at the bear and wolf place in West Yellowstone.

The girls got to help feed the bears (not while they were in there of course).

Megan spent more time playing in the crib than she did sleeping in it.

Josh REALLY likes chocolate ice cream. One of the only places open in town was a little grocery store where we got our ice cream fix. Apparently the restaurants up there don't sell ice cream when it's cold outside.

Yellowstone

We took a last minute trip to Yellowstone a couple weeks ago and had a great time! We stayed in a nice little cabin in Island Park and drove into Yellowstone everyday. We saw parts of the park we had never seen before and animals we had never seen in the wild before. The weather was perfect and the kids were great! And it was SO nice to go and do something different for a few days!!
When you go to Yellowstone, you see a lot of these...
And spend a lot of time in here...
Thankfully, Josh did a fair amount of this...
And thankfully this Bison didn't get any closer when I decided to set up our lunch right next to him...I didn't realize he was there until after I had set Laura and Josh down and went back to the car to get the rest of our lunch (he was hiding behind some bushes).
The kids were a little nervous but mostly entertained by him during lunch.



This was at Mammoth Hot Springs. It was pretty cool. We've been to Yellowstone a couple of times since we've been married, but never this far north.






This was at Grand Prismatic Spring. Nate has always wanted to go here and it was beautiful!

And, finally, what would a trip to Yellowstone be without Old Faithful? There are more pictures, but I'll save them for next time...this is long enough already.

Bowling

While my sister's two girls were here for a week staying with my mom and dad, we got to hang out with cousins all week. One of the days we took the kids bowling at BYU. They were all really cute and it brought back good memories from when I was little.