Utah, Days 3, 4

Monday morning we went back to SLC to tour the Conference Center.  The tour was...  disappointing.  I really wanted to hear about the building itself and the artwork.  It's such a cool structure that can be beautiful and HUGE and comfortably seat 21,000 people (!!!).  But the tour was led by a couple sister missionaries who spoke too quietly to even be heard, and were mostly just interested in teaching us the first discussion.  It was (and I say this as a member who loves this church) cringey.  And there were a few nonmembers on the tour, and I wanted to apologize to them.  Ugh.

Also, thanks to ten years of droughts, they had the fountains on the rooftop turned off.  Which is probably a good idea, but looked super lame.

Oh, well.

We did get a nice family picture with this statue of the Christus.  Apparently the one that used to be in the Visitor's Center is in storage, and this is a 3/4 replica!

And behind us is the scaffolding enveloping the Salt Lake temple!  It's prettier when you can see it!

Colton finds the worst seat at the Assembly Hall!

And we wandered into the Tabernacle, where MoTab practices!  That organ is so iconic.

There was more we wanted to see at Temple Square, but it was the 4th of July and everything else was closed.  So Craig dropped me off at my dear friend Emily Kartchner's house in South Jordan, and he took the kids bowling.  It turned out most of them had never been bowling before, and they had a great time.  Watching Camille watch her ball roll down the lane was the most entertaining thing ever.  And I had a fabulous time catching up with Emily and hearing about her teenage son who is also named Bentley!  And, of course, I forgot to take pictures.  

This is how everyone bowls, right?

Emily dropped me back off at our townhouse where Craig was feeding everyone.  And then we went to Thanksgiving Point to watch their fireworks!  We don't usually take the kids to professional fireworks shows (unless it's done by Disney) so this was a real treat for them-- everyone enjoyed it, even if we had to stay up way too late!

I really don't know why Camille insists on making that face in every. single. picture.  

The next morning we went back to SLC to finish up everything we still wanted to see!  We drove around the U of U campus for a bit, just so we could say we didn't only show the kids BYU.  Then we went to the church's Welfare Square and took a tour.  It was Craig who wanted to do that-- I thought it sounded depressing and weird-- and it turned out to be really cool!

They made us guess how long it took to build this grain silo in the 1930s.  Our guesses ranged from 6 months to 10 years.  We were WAY OFF.*

The tour began with a short film explaining the church's welfare program.  In the middle of it, they had a two-second clip showing a bishop meeting with his people to determine the members' welfare needs and-- lo and behold!-- my sister Tracy was in the clip!  It was so unexpected and exciting to glimpse her there!  It was from when she was the Relief Society president in her Manhattan ward.  Crazy!!!

Tracy's FAMOUS!!!

We got to see them slicing up loaves of bread

I think this was the end of the tour, where they were bottling milk, and we got samples of chocolate milk (the same stuff that they serve at the BYU Creamery).  It was amazing.

But my kids' favorite part of Welfare Square was Deseret Industries.  Bentley recently tried thrifting, and when he saw this store (which was beautifully clean and had all the clothes nicely arranged by color) he got so excited.  So we let them run around and buy a few things.  Camille picked out a very fluffy sweatshirt and proceeded to nap like this in the car:

My crazy girl

Next we went to the Church History Museum.  It was great, and my favorite part was the upstairs where they had wonderful artwork (which will get its own blog post soon).  As is often the case, Craig had to drag me away before everyone else died of boredom.  They did have fun with this stand where they could pretend they were addressing everyone at General Conference:

Camille looks like she's actually terrified to be speaking

But Colton's enjoying himself!

We would have liked to have seen the Ancestry building, too, but once again we'd run out of time.  We got lunch at our townhouse and headed back to the BYU Bookstore where the kids got the t-shirts we'd been promising them.  This time campus was flooded with FSY kids, so even though they're younger than the college set, at least my own kids could finally get a feel for what BYU looks like when it isn't deserted!  Camille also wanted a stuffed animal, so she got to buy this with her own money:

We had scheduled a tour of campus for 4pm, so we met at the alumni building (which was still being built when we left 16 years ago).  We'd only signed up for a walking tour, so when there turned out to be a golf cart we could ride around in, the kids were thrilled.  And the young coed who was our tour guide was fun and personable and everyone enjoyed the tour.  I think she undid the damage Craig and I had inflicted on everyone with our overly long, hot tour a few days before! 😂

Getting Camille to stop talking long enough so that the tour guide (and Bentley and Kendra) could get a word in edgewise was challenging, though...

We picked up Lindsy and a friend (boyfriend?) of hers and got dinner at Burgers Supreme.  This is just an old crummy-looking burger joint, but it's where Craig and I had our first date, so we were excited to go again!  They also have really great milkshakes and fry sauce, so there was plenty of reasons to return!

We sat in this booth laughing like we'd known each other for ages, even though it was basically a blind date!

There we all are!

And then right back to BYU again!  There were a few things we hadn't hit: the library and the Wilkinson Center! 

There we are with the sun in our eyes and the "Y" on the mountain behind us

The library was first.  It's so fun for kids who are used to the public library to finally see a nice, big university library!  And my kids were properly impressed!  Then as we were wandering around, it occurred to me that it would be fun to see my master's thesis sitting on the shelf.  I asked someone to look it up for me (I couldn't remember the title any more!) and we found it up on the fifth floor. 

It was fun to show it off to my kids, but I was a little irked that there were a bunch of pencil markings in it.

See kids???  You mom worked super hard for this thing!

Then it hit me.  If there were pencil marks in it, that meant-- gasp!!!-- that someone had actually READ IT.  I flipped to the back of it, and it's been checked out!  QUITE A BIT!!!  And that, honestly, made me happier than just about anything!

Who would have guessed???

Craig and I were slightly disappointed that the food court at the Wilk is now all your standard fast food-- Subway and Chick-fil-A and the like-- but that probably got my kids more excited to one day attend BYU than anything else, so I guess someone knew what they were doing!

It was a very busy day, but we were very happy with how everything had gone.

*Correct answer: 8.5 days.  They built that thing out of poured concrete in just 8 1/2 days!!!!!!