A lot of stuff

We have been on vacation for a couple of weeks and I have a lot of things to share. I'm posting a ton of pictures, so if you don't really, really love me, I give you permission to skip this post altogether. It's not too bad, I don't go into too much detail, but it's still a lot. There's actually a lot more that I could say, but I decided to be a good journalist and give you just the highlights. 

This is my sweet little family in the smallest  IMAX movie theatre I have ever been in. It probably seated 30 people, and the time that we went to go see it, we were the only four people in the theatre. I giggled the whole way through the show about airplane racing and, yes, I nursed Zoe while we were in there. I figured we had the whole place to ourselves.

If there was one thing that I could say about us is that if we are anywhere near a science or space museum, we go there. Yes, we are nerdy enough to pay homage to the first monkey (his name is HAM) that was put into space. We paid our respects at his gravesite (he died of natural causes) which is outside a small space museum in Alamagordo, NM.

If there is another thing I can say is that when we travel, we like to put hairnets on our children. Putting hairnets on children means they are going into a place where they will be learning about something new. This was the day we were touring a pistachio farm/factory in New Mexico. Zoe loved it.

We have decided that the Junior Ranger programs at National Parks are a must-do. This one was at Carlsbad Caverns.

If you don't know what The Thing is, I'm not going to tell you. You have to make your way to the backwoods stop on the 10 HWY and pay your own $1 to see it.

Here's where we get to the special part of this post. In between two tiring and fun vacations, our Annie was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was a beautiful day.

Here's our beautiful girl dressed in the baptism gown which was made, so lovingly, by Grandma Cathy. Because she was taking care of Grandpa Jack, neither of them were able to make it to the baptism, but by sending the dress, she sent their love  to Arizona.

Proud papa and mama. Zoe will, one day, be happy to know she was there, too.

The rest of the group that was there to help celebrate and support Annie in her wonderful decision.

After the baptism we left for the Grand Canyon. This is one of my favorite pictures of my sweet girl.

We went to the Grand Canyon because our dear friends were stopping by our neck of the woods as part of a six week epic adventure (which they are still on). Brian, Rebecca and Carl are our family and we simply loved being with them for a couple of weeks.

John took some spectacular pictures of the canyon.

Another spectacular view.

And guess who turned 7 months while we were camping? I forgot to pack a piece of 12X!2 paper, but we made do with a 11X12 newsletter from the gift shop. She's getting bigger and bigger. We love her more and more every day.