The Tangrens

My sister, Holly has long had a healthy fear of trains. Even the sound of them can strike fear, much less feeling the movement of their passing. We live by not one but two active train tracks so I was completely resolved to the fact that they would probably never visit in my house for longer than an hour or so if they visited at all. As their visit got closer we noticed that they were doing work on the near train track and trains were not traveling on them. We let them know and they said that they'd try staying at our house while they were in Utah. We were sooo excited. By the time they were here the trains were running again but not nearly as many or nearly as fast. We held our breath and I got ear plugs for my brave sister. While there were more trains passing then she would have preferred to hear only one caused movement to the house. She survived but I wouldn't blame her for not wanting to stay again.

The visit started with My sister her husband and I (and Noah) going to a movie with my nephew watching Hyrum. That was not a problem because he could have been here alone and probably wouldn't have noticed since I said that he could play the Wii when his cousins got to the house. He is sadly COMPLETELY addicted. It goes without saying that there was a lot of this going on while they were here.

While we were gone there was a wind storm and 3/4ths of our tree in the front yard collapsed.

The next day was a Salt Lake City day. We started at the temple where my nephew Ethan and Holly were able to go do baptisms.

After they were done we hit temple square; saw the Christus,

the tabernacle

and then headed to the Conferance Center

Hyrum gave Ethan a workout on top of the Conference Center.

The next day we hit BYU campus in attempts to impress my nephew who could be considering it in 6 years. :) There was EFY going on and while the kids were gathering they had people beat boxing. Now Hyrum is a huge fan of beat boxing ever since Derek came up with this game.

I've since "sung" some beat boxing to Noah when he was fussy and found Hyrum doing "the Robot" to the beat. So when he heard this going on he couldn't control his arms...and feet. That's new but apparently a very important part of the dance.

I don't know if you can hear the beat box very good above the din of the gathering teenagers.

We ended our BYU tour with the obligatory stop at the cougar for pictures. I realized while we were here that it was Noah's first time at the cougar too.

Saturday we decided to head up the canyon for a hike. Unfortunately we'd never been on this particular hike and didn't know exactly where the trail head was. Finally we found A trail head and got started.

It was a pretty steep hike and we had kids that were tired just feet into the hike so we took the first path to level ground off the main trail. We each found our hiking styles.

I love this picture of the two extremes of hiking. For a while let's follow Jaliegh's hike...it started like this then became

That, of course, is the back pack carrier that Hyrum abandoned fairly quickly on the hike.

Her Dad picked up a bouquet of beautiful wildflowers on the way which became energy flowers.

Things got a lot better after this.

Nathan must know his daughter.

The hike turned out to be pretty eventful. The path we ultimately found out was probably a cow path because it lead to the pasture we found them in when we arrived at the trail head. But getting there was a little scary at times.

There was a daring rescue :)

And an extremely steep incline that had me worried with an adorable bundle on my chest