It's Great to be 8

Adrian was thrilled to get scriptures and clothes. For fun he got an XBOX game based on the Nickelodeon series Avatar, not the blue people.

He didn't wear this combination to church, this was just to see if his new clothes fit. He's so handsome.
Adrian's favorite birthday food is brownies!
We're all looking forward to his Baptism on Saturday.

We Finished!

We finished reading The Book of Mormon this month so we went to the temple to celebrate. It was a beautiful peaceful day.

True love that lasts forever is the best thing in the world.
Here are the kids by one of the east doors. They are so adorable.
Although I didn't exactly commission this photograph I figure it is a good belly shot and hopefully there won't be many more.
We decided to let Donald have some driving experience on the outer loop of the Beltway; just so long as I'm not driving! The traffic was horrible on the way to the temple and on the way back. How do people live here!? Thankfully Dan had thought ahead and got a movie from redbox for the kids.

Monumental Saturday

Today we toured monuments and memorials in DC.

After riding the Metro in (which is always one of the highlights), we started at the Washington Monument. That end of the mall was very windy, so we didn't do too much there other than look at it as we walked by.

The next stop was the World War II memorial. It was built since the last time either Sarah or I (this is one of my few blog entries) had been there, so it was fun to see something new. There were posts all around a pool, and each of the posts had the name of a state or other possession of the United States. Adrian was amazed at how many states there were, and that the soldiers had protected them all during the war.

Sarah wasn't feeling too well by then, so she rested on a bench while the kids went around and had their pictures taken by their birth states. We had a lot of states to visit.

We had to remember to get Virginia for little baby Jared (at least that's what we're calling him now).

After the WWII monument, we walked to the Vietnam memorial. We didn't take any pictures, but the kids were impressed with it. We looked at the reference books and found out that there are Blodgett and Weir names on the wall, but we didn't look for them. We did see one pane that had the names Charles Frank and Daniel David (four different first names).

From there we went to the Lincoln Memorial. Sarah just finished a book about Gettysburg, and Rebecca is learning about the Civil War in school, so it was an interesting site to see. The three oldest kids each took time to read the Gettysburg address that was engraved on the wall, even without us saying anything. They liked sitting on the edge of the building and looking out over the reflecting pool. Unfortunately, it was so windy that the pool was really choppy.

As we left the memorial, Rebecca found a penny. The girls thought it was pretty lucky to find one there since it had Lincoln on one side and the memorial building on the other.

From there we retraced our steps back to the Metro and came home. It was a hard day for the littlest kids and Sarah, but everyone thought it was worth it to see those famous sites and remember parts of our history.

Memory Lane

We transferred all our old files onto our new computer so I had to take a little trip down memory lane. This is our 2 year old Charlie. He's still this cute.