Brian's Parents Come to Visit

We had the great privelage of having Brian's parents come and visit us the end of July for one crazy, fun-filled, whirlwind week. As Kylee would say, "It's a miracle." It was great to have family come visit us, especially since we don't get to see family very often, and we usually just sit here all sad and lonely (sniff). Even though we were dead tired by the time they left, we had so much fun, and we're so glad they came to see us! So, anybody else wanna come visit? We'll show ya a good time, I promise. :) By the way, these pictures are in backwards order of when we did stuff. I was just too lazy to switch them around.

Ellen in front of the big bat statue at the Louisville Slugger museum, where they make....can you guess? Louisville Slugger bats!

The girls showing off their souvenir bats from the museum

Brian with Kylee who's holding some old famous baseball player's bat (can't remember whose it was)

Brian imitating the great Babe Ruth at the museum

Makayla took this picture of us in Brown County. Child prodigee!

Brian and his dad at the Cincinnati Reds game. They lost, as usual. Nice matching Utah shirts, boys.

Ellen and the girls. Isn't this picture adorable?

Me, Ellen, and Makayla at the Johnson farm in Kirtland.

All of us, except Brian, on one of the Ohio river cruises, with the skyline of Cincy in the background. Brian had to work most days, poor thing.

This pretty much sums up how we all felt after dropping off my in-laws in Louisville when they flew out. Yep, that's Makayla sleeping under there.

Disney World

Here's a few pictures from our fun, but HOT, day at the Magic Kingdom. Along with our family, Matt, Aline, Nancy, and Bruno went.

The 4 of us in front of the castle. If you're wondering why there's a cloud of smoke in front of the castle, that's from the show that was going on in front of it.

Kylee and Makayla in front of Mickey's house.

Makayla, Nancy, Aline, and Kylee

Me, Brian, Matt, Bruno, and Kylee on Splash Mountain (Kylee was behind Brian)

Trying to pull out the Sword in the Stone

The Light Parade that night.

Sea World!

A miracle has happened - I finally got motivated to put up our pictures from Sea World. Because of the passes we bought, we ended up going to Sea World 4 times, so we ended up with a couple hundred pictures! So you can imagine why I've been overwhelmed at the thought of trying to post some pictures. I'm just warning you, there are probably a couple dozen pictures here, so if you don't give a hoot what we did at Sea World, you'd better exit now! :)

All of us at Sea World - well, before Matt and Aline got there.

The girls with Elmo after the Elmo show.

This was at the dolphin nursery, where pregnant moms up to 1 year old dolphins are kept on display in their own little pool. This little guy kept showing off for us. It was so much fun watching these little ones!

I think this is the same dolphin as above - he actually flung himself up on this rock and posed for us!

This is a new mom with her 4 day old baby dolphin. So adorable!!

The Shamu show, which was so incredible! We saw it twice, and got some great pictures.

Kylee was so excited when we got splashed by Shamu!

Makayla sitting on Grandpa's lap during the show.

Everyone waiting for the show to start. I'm pretty sure they only look miserable because it was hotter than the blazing depths of heck.

Us learning how to feed the sting rays. Sounds kind of freaky, but it was SO FUN! I liked it even more than feeding the dolphins. You stick the fish between your 2 fingers, hold your hand under the water, then a sting ray comes by and sucks the fish right out of your hand. It feels so funny you can't help but laugh!

I love this picture, it looks like this sting ray's gonna eat Makayla's arm!

Kylee trying to get brave enough to touch one of the sting rays

Me and Makayla feeding the dolphins. You would think this would be funner than feeding sting rays, but the dolphins don't really like to be touched, and the Sea World employees yell at you for every little thing, so it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be.

This funny little sea lion was waiting for us to feed it something. Sorry buddy, we spent all our money on the sting rays.

A mom and baby mantee.

These silly little birds were all over the place trying to beg food from people.

Jenicca, Jason, Logan and Kylee in this cave thing where they had all sorts of aquariums.

This is one of the aquariums in the cave where the kids can pop their heads up and view the fish from "inside" the aquarium.

Beach Bums (and Aquatica)

Of course, you can't go to Florida without going to the beach, so we had one really fun beach day. The water was soooo warm!! We had an awesome experience while we were swimming. We noticed some large shadows moving towards us in the water, and at first my mom thought they were sting rays, but then somebody else shouted that they were manatees. We moved closer to them, and sure enough, there were 2 manatees swimming right by us. You're not supposed to touch them because they're protected, but we saw their heads come up for air. Talk about awesome! We ended up also seeing several large sting rays in the water that day, but they just fly right by you, so you can't really get a good look at them. It was probably the funnest time I've ever had at a beach (and that's really saying something!) Also, I'm throwing in the only 2 pictures we took at Aquatica (the Sea World water park). We went to the water park twice, but for some reason we only took 2 pictures - maybe because water and cameras don't mix.

Aline with Kylee and Makayla - just look at that cute pregnant belly!

Grandpa going down the waterslide with Makayla

The girls going down the waterslide by themselves - they LOVED it!!