Our 11 Year Anniversary

Rock and I have been married for 11 years now!  It's been such an adventurous 11 years!  We've moved 10 times and have lived in 6 different states!  I am so blessed to be married to a man who is not afraid to pursue his dreams.  He is truly courageous and full of faith.  It is such a sweet assurance to me to know that he is guided in his decisions for our family, because he lives in a way that qualifies him for that guidance.  We are so blessed because of his willingness to pursue what is right, even when it's scary or difficult.


To celebrate our 11 years of marriage - we took the 5 kids and my parents and headed to Vegas.  Sure, it doesn't sound like the most romantic get-away, but we had a blast!  Taking all the kids with us (my parents came along because they were so kind as to agree to watch them) on a 14 hour drive (round trip) just seemed much easier to me than teaching Joshua to drink from a bottle and pumping all that milk.  Go figure.

Everyone was so great on the way there!  We only had to stop once for a potty break and they just played together and quietly worked on things.  Joshua didn't cry at all.  It made me want to do road trips more often.

We've been studying ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome and the Middle East a lot lately so we took the kids to see statues and decorations at Ceasar's palace, the Luxor, and Bellagio.  We tried to ignore all the gambling people and "scantily clad" women as much as possible, but Bud said it did make him feel kind of sad to see so many people gambling.  At least he didn't go to the top of the escalator and shout rebukes to the people like one of my younger brothers did so many years ago (you know who you are!) much to the embarrassment of my parents.

As we were walking down the strip on the way to the M&M museum, we ran into this guy:

(It's Jerry Springer).  I almost had the kids pose with him, but then decided that we weren't big enough fans to take up his time.  So we posed with this guy instead:

We also went to Mandalay Bay to walk through the aquarium.  It's pretty neat, they give you these little radio sticks and you punch in numbers that you see as you walk through, and then you get to hear all about what you are looking at.  Spice, Bud and Little Miss loved this and listened to every number you could punch in.  Bazinks and Ray just loved looking at all the fish as they surrounded us while we walked through the tunnels.

Rock and I went to the U2 concert that Friday night.  I hadn't been to a concert in years!  It seems like I used to go all the time in high school, but I don't think I had been to one since.  U2 has some major talent.  They were so great to watch.  The stage was amazing as well and I was really impressed with the quality of the sound (my youngest brother would tease me right about now about sounding like an old person.)  Black-eyed Peas opened for U2 and I actually liked quite a lot of their songs.  Fergie has an amazing voice.


Of course, I forgot to take my camera to the concert so here's a picture someone else took that must have been sitting pretty close to us:

 And in case someone forgot what U2 looks like, here's a picture of them:

We got back to the hotel to find my mom taking Ray up and down the elevator to keep him happy.  He had awakened while we were gone and wouldn't go back to sleep so my mom was pacing with him.  She learned that he likes elevator rides.  I have such an awesome mom!

My parents left early the next morning.  Rock and I took the kids to Circus Circus.  One of the clowns asked for volunteers up on stage so Bud went up there.  It was great because they were doing a limbo contest, and while others were struggling to go under the bar, Bud could just walk right under it.  It was hilarious.  Everyone laughed.  He won, of course, and he pretty much made the show.

After Circus Circus we decided to go to a buffet, but since the prices of buffets in Vegas are not what they used to be, we stopped in Mesquite for one instead.

I suppose we were a spectacle ourselves as we walked through casinos with our double stroller and 5 little kids in tow, but I did get a lot of compliments on their cuteness from people with good taste in cuteness ;-)


It also gave us a great opportunity to talk about what is real.  We saw so many replicas of things we had learned about in our history lessons.  There was one painting that looked like a mosaic.  We got really close to look at it and realized it had only been painted to look like a very real mosaic.  It was a beautiful painting, but we were kind of disappointed.  We saw beautiful statues that were made to look like stone and marble, and of course the replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Arch de Triumphe, the Statue of Liberty and other things.

We talked about how so many things in Las Vegas are "replicas" of the real thing.  Then we talked about how Satan likes to take everything that is good and offer people a "replica" or a way to misuse it - like he takes divine worth and turns it into self-worship and countless other examples.  As we looked around, we saw how there are so many people looking to find happiness, only to later find that it was a "fake" or "replica" kind of happiness that ultimately brings them sadness.


The drive home wasn't quite as pleasant as the way there.  They all held up really well until about the last hour of the trip which seemed to last about 3 hours.  I can't complain though, 13 out of 14 hours is better than I expected.  Maybe we'll try a road trip to Oklahoma or Florida this summer!