Ammon, Shari, Glen and Phebe: Adrianne and the boys came to town!

Ammon and I had a lot of fun when the Burklunds were in town. We even took a couple of days of work to play hookie and go goof off with the kids. We went to Tempe Town Lake, the Mesa Childrens Museaum, the Mesa Temple, Swimming, GEO Chashing, and Hiking! We had so much fun while they were in town! They even came and saw us in the Easter Pageant onee night!

This is our nephew, Jacob Burklund. Yes that is rain on the window but it was gone and we had blue skys 15 minutes later. Gotta love AZ, when it rains, it come and goes quickly so that we never get tired of it.

This is our nephew Parley Burklund and his energy levels match that of his hair color!

Now we go to Tempe Town Lake where we got to see birds, lots of airplanes, some fishermen, and a waterfall. Not to mention the river actually had water in it (First time in 12 years so it is a big deal for us, and at the time of this posting it is about 3/4 what it used to be and will probably be dry again by June :(

Here we are walking around the Tempe Beach Park as we try to kill some time before the Mesa Childrens Museaum opens at 10am.

Next we went to the Mesa Childrens Museaum and did some playing around. Brandon you would have loved this as they have an entire section dedicated to the Cactus Leauge and the history about it and all the teams that come to AZ for spring training every year. The A's are in the city next door, but our main team here in Mesa during the spring is the Cubs. We are even going to be building them a new training facility in the next couple of years! Here the boys are making flags that have baseball players they get to color in with crayons! What fun! But watch out for Parley, he gets carried away with the stamps!

We were experimenting wtih the erasable pattern board to see if we could come up with something for mom's (Adrianne's) next quilting project. "What do you think mom?"

This is Shari's department. She was helping the boys learn about patterns with a Kalidascope computer program. You can divide the circle in half, thirds, quarters, . . . up to 10 different sections and each section is a mirror of the other sections. It is a lot of fun to play with!

Here is a video of one of the computers they had there that was helping us learn about patterns.

This was Ammon and Parley's favorit room! The plastic tubes had maganets at each end and we could connect them together with metal spheres to build cool things! I think Ammon and Parley were in there for 30 whole minutes! (That is a long time when a 4 and 6 year old don't seem to be able to focus for more than 5 minutes on any one thing.)

This is what our finnished tower looked like.

I do think that Parley liked knocking the towers down more than he did building them as this was the 4th tower and it was the only one Ammon could get a picture of before Parley knocked it down!

Later that day we went for a Swim at Grandma Debbie's house!

Shhhhh! Not while I am plotting . . .

This is Oliver swimming to mom.

Mike teaching Parley to swim without flotation devices. Go Parley!

This is Oliver playing with the beach ball. Boy does he love the water!

Burklund family swimming.

Hail Oliver! King of the Burklunds!

Hail Oliver! King of the Burklunds! (Kind of reminds you of Ceasar, no?!)

Another day after doing some GEO Cashing we did some homework while Mike did some work. Guess that is what happens when you can work from anyplace that has internet. You missed a great time Mike. Maybe next time you come we can go back!

This is a view of the east side of the valley, not but 10 minutes from where Shari works.

It is days like these that remind us why we live in AZ. It is beautiful and the weather is so wonderful 8 months out of the year!

This happens a lot here. My what a beautiful paint brush God has. This is looking out over the valley where we live as you can tell by the street lights starting to appear along the horizon.

Aren't the sunsets georgous. You may not have noticed, but Adrianne is hidding behind Ammon as it was the 6 of us hiking.

Another view of the valley we live in. This is looking Southwest, which is the Valley South of where we live.

Gosh Shari, can you see our house way out there? I think it is just left of the sun!

You know, it really is cool when the sun drops down behind the western horizon and not five minutes later you can turn around and watch the moon rise up over the eastern horizon. Yep this is the moonrise that immediately followed the sunrise. I think Adrianne got better pictures, so I hope that she puts them on a disk we can bring home with us when we come out for the 4th of July.