Vacation: Nauvoo

We spent our last day of vacation in Nauvoo. The morning had a bit of a rough start.... we were eating breakfast at a restaurant across the road from our Hotel and Wesley started acting really grumpy and wouldn't eat anything. Then he puked all over the floor! Luckily the people at the nearest table had just vacated. The staff were really nice and I took Wesley back to the hotel while everyone else finished up. As I left I asked my mom to bring Wesley an apple juice, but up in our room Wesley was screaming and crying for milk, so I tried calling my mom to tell her to bring milk instead of apple juice but she didn't answer my call. Not wanting her to have to pay for apple juice I ran back down the stairs of our hotel to tell her. I called on her my phone again as I went down the stairs and as I put the phone to my ear I opened the front door. Bad idea. Somehow I managed to open the door right in to my face! My nose started bleeding immediately and my mom answered the phone right then. I could barely talk because I was both crying and laughing really hard so I just said, "milk...not apple juice" and hung up. At this moment Rhonda and Brian came in to the hotel and saw me bleeding all over and crying/laughing and had no clue what I had just done. Anyway.... my nose hurt for a few weeks afterwards.  A few weeks before this I shut the car door on my forehead while taking the kids to the library. Apparently I need to be more alert when opening/closing doors!

Miles and Grandma shared a bed at our hotel :)

Since Wes wasn't feeling good we let him wear his Batman jammies all day (Haha... just kidding. He wears them all the time!) After checking out of our hotel we went to Carthage jail. Since I've been to Carthage 3 times I stayed outside with Scooter and Wesley and cleaned out the van.

Then we took a tour of Nauvoo. The weather was perfect and there weren't many people there so we had a nice, relaxing time.

The beautiful Nauvoo temple. Looking back I wish Brian and I had gone to the temple while we had 3 grandparents there with the kids. I can't remember why we didn't. I think they didn't have an early enough session and we needed to make it home that night.

We took a covered wagon ride pulled by two huge oxen. They even let Scooter ride!

Cute pioneer Nora

Of course Sophie decided to wear the boys clothes.... no pioneer dresses for this forward thinking, independent girl :)

I challenged the Grandma's to a stick pull. It was a tie! We love these ladies so much!

Miles claimed he was so tired he couldn't possibly take another step...

Grandma and Nora

We had a great time in beautiful Nauvoo! I love living close to such an amazing Church history site. We also walked down the main street in Nauvoo and had some of their yummy fudge and grandma, the girls and I went in a cute little antique store.  Then we started the 5 hour drive home!

Vacation: Oz Museum & Church History Sites

From Colorado we decided to make our way home through some Church History Sites. On our drive  our car top carrier was bouncing up and down like crazy so we had to hold it down through the sun roof for a while. We stopped and tightened all up and that didn't seem to work so I shoved a water bottle between the roof and the carrier and that did the trick!

On our way through the great state of Kansas we took a detour to go through the Oz Museum. It was pretty cool. Brian kept Scooter and went to a nearby park to play instead. The museum was very cool and in the cutest little town.

There was a "yellow brick road" that led from the museum to the park. Of course we had to skip down it singing the song.

We made it to Independence, Missouri that night and were able to tour the Visitors' Center quickly. It was awesome. They had some very kid friendly things and a great video on Families that had all the grown ups in tears - which Sophie thought was pretty funny.

We stayed near Independence and then visited Liberty Jail which was pretty neat. Naunie stayed outside with Scooter this time since she'd been there before.

Then we made our way up through Adam-ondi-Ahman. It was beautiful there, but it was a pretty hot and humid day so we didn't stay too long.

Scooter was such a good dog on our super long trip :)

We made it to Nauvoo in the evening right when everything closed up.

 

But we decided we didn't want to miss out on Nauvoo together so we found a big room in this lovely hotel and stayed the night. It was a really cool old building and we were all excited to stay there. After we put the kids in bed Brian and I walked a block to the Nauvoo temple and walked around it for a while. It was perfect. We love Nauvoo!