Recap & St. Louis

It's May and I've only posted 3x's this year!

Well here is a recap (I'm getting really good at doing these.)

We still don't have a camera that I like which is part of the issue with not blogging. Also I'm still the seminary teacher and a mother which is really the issue with not blogging.

I love teaching seminary. I truly think it's the main reason why I was able to stave off the Seasonal Affect Depression this year. It's fabulous to have the Spirit in my home every morning Mon-Fri.

The car seat woes from the previous post were resolved about a week or two later (which I knew in my head would happen sooner or later like all stages but it was still really hard). 

What helped push the transition faster and more smoothly was help from my most trusted mother's aide: books.

I've been testing out audio books with Aurora off and on over the last 6 months and she just grasped the

concept that the cd is telling her stories from some of her favorite books. 

So now when we go anywhere it's "Do you want to listen to Monkeys (5 Little Monkeys Jumping On the Bed) or to Cows (Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type)?" And she chooses one and happily gets into the car and her car seat. 

Her favorite right now is Audrey Wood's (my all time fave children's author) King Bidgood is in the Bathtub. The sound recording is quite fabulous and it's like listening to a musical. I highly recommend it! 

Jared and I took a short vacation together to St. Louis. He had a meeting there on a Thursday and it coincided with the schools' spring breaks around here. So I didn't have to teach and my Mom and Dad watched Aurora for us, it was perfect.

So despite the quite warm weather the previous week we had snow on our "spring break" vacation.

Quite a bit of snow.

Of course, we saw the Arch.

But by the time we bought our tickets to go up this is what it looked like...

(Note: If you ever visit St. Louis buy your tickets for the arch beforehand...we tried too but instead had to buy them the day of and you have to wait several hours before you can go up)

This was some of our views from the top...

Not great, but still fun.

 

This is the door to the elevator to ride up and down to the Arch.

It's so small, I thought it could easily be a hobbit's door.

 (Remember that I am hobbit size when you're looking at the size of the door in this pic.)

This is one of my fave pics from the trip.

We are in the waiting area at the Arch about to board the elevators and go up.

I was going to type out the whole "witch" scene from Monty Python but decided against it in favor of just publishing the clip itself.  You're welcome and enjoy! :) 

Peasant 1: If she weighed the same as a duck... she's made of wood
Sir Bedevere: And therefore...

Peasant 2: ...A witch!

(I guess Jared is the "duck" and I'm the "witch")

We also took a ride on the ferry boats. I enjoyed the names of the boats.

Ours was called the Becky Thatcher and the other boat was the Tom Sawyer.

We had dinner at a local pizza place: Imo's Pizza.

I didn't have high expectations but it was truly great pizza!

We went to the St. Louis temple that night.

The next day we went to the Science Museum (no pics really to speak of)

and my favorite place: The Butterfly Garden.

It happened to be Blue Morpho month and so the most gorgeous and huge blue butterflies were everywhere along with all kinds of other butterflies. 

Okay, enough pics of just butterflies...here is one of us.

The garden is inside and feels like a tropical rainforest which is good compared to outside...

That night for dinner we went to the Melting Pot (a fondue restaurant)

We have never been there before but we had heard good things about it.

Even though my expectations were relatively high...I was still pleasantly surprised how good it was.

We did the 3 course meal! It was so much food but soooo good!

Jared wanted me to take a pic of the meat plate...he was so excited about it. :) 

After a fabulous weekend, we drove home through the snow to our much missed beautiful daughter.
(Thanks Mom & Dad!)

This is what she got out of the deal: 

Coming soon to a blog post near you:

Aurora's 2nd Birthday!