Utah Extravaganza 2011

We went to Utah to see two very special people graduate from BYU; my brother, the Young Brigham from Brigham Young and Kent’s sister, the cougar riding hooded Maria with her Master’s. Congrats!

Kent and I love, I mean love going back up to the Y to visit, to eat chocolate covered cinnamon bears from the bookstore, and remember good old times.  What a wonderful place!

After living in Arizona, Utah is seems so lush, green and cool. It was so beautiful.

We got to visit with a bunch of family and old room mates and friends and meet some of their spouses and kids! That was fun.

After the commencement ceremony we got together at a park with some of  the Slack family. Uncle Tim couldn’t couldn’t get enough of Elise and played with her the whole evening. We had yummy KFC and had fun chatting and playing.

We somehow got the four blue eyed cousins together to pose for a picture too.

The next day was graduation, and we were all over campus! We dressed the girls in Blue and White and tried to instill into their little hearts the desire to graduate from BYU one day.  I thing they thought that their Aunt Maria and Uncle Brigham were pretty awesome for graduating.

 

My whole entire family met up together in Provo, so that was really neat. We were all able to be together on Friday so we spent the afternoon together on campus and ate lunch together in the Wilkinson center.

There was in fact one more graduation that day that I did not mention, my sister in law, Jane Ann! She actually graduated BYU last year but being in New York at the time, she never got to walk or wear a cap and gown so she borrowed Brigham’s and we had a simple family impromptu two minute graduation ceremony for her. What a gal!

That evening we had a happening BBQ party at South Fork Park – my personal favorite park in all the world. It was so fun to visit a bunch of family, eat yummy burgers, and play bocce ball, and ultimate frisbee.

OK, I have to tell this story. So last year when we were up at the same park I took a cute picture of me kissing Anna’s cheek when she was a baby, and I wanted to get a similar one of me kissing Elise…but as you can see she did not try to look cute for the picture.

Kent also hiked Provo Peak with Brigham, we walked up to Bridal Veil Falls with the girls, Elizabeth and I attended a Zumba class with Shayla. Elizabeth made us green shakes for breakfast one morning, we ate 6 different type of pizza one night with Maria and Joel, we visited lots of old friends and roommates, we stopped in St. George on the way home and visited the Brigham Young winter home with my parents and attended the St. George Temple.

Side note: driving from AZ to UT is not fun with a baby and a toddler. But driving through the night is even a worse idea the driving through the day.