Vegas

During last year's Spring Break, I was eight months pregnant, painting practically the entire house (in a heck of a lot of pain, I might add) and potty-training Brynn. I couldn't have been happier to see Spring Break come to an end. But THIS year, I am sad to say good-bye to it! Over the last two weeks we traveled to Las Vegas to be with the Johnson's, and Washington D.C. to be with the Sparks Family. It was the best Spring Break ever!

My favorite part of Las Vegas (I'll post about D.C. later) was obviously being able to hang out with my amazing family! We met up there with Marty's brother Greg, and his other brother Kelly and his family. I have the best and the funnest in-laws ever!!!!

Aside from that, I think one of the highlights of Vegas was the Bellagio. I remembered the fountains (which are choreographed to music) from the movie "Ocean's Eleven" but it's hard to tell on TV just how incredible they are. Kelly had seen them and was talking them up so much, and saying he could spend all night there watching them. Then he started to worry that he had built it up too much, but no way! They were AMAZING!!!

In fact, we had to go back the next day to see more!
And here are a few other shots from inside the Bellagio.

A hideous picture of me, but the giant snail behind me is made of roses.

If you read my blog, you should know by now that Brynn not only loves princesses, she actually believes she is a princess. So you can imagine her excitement, no - elation! when we took her to the Excalibur (a giant castle).
New York, New York

We walked down the strip a little at night, too.
But not all of the kids made it...

Here's Marty at Treasure Island. That's a pirate ship in the background. Landon and Carter are really into pirates right now, and we were super excited to see the show (the pirate ships sail in and shoot cannons at each other and pirates jump ships, etc) but they didn't allow strollers (what the?) so that ruled us out, BIG time, and we left.

We saw them...

And her...

But by far the biggest spectacle was...

us.

With our two kids and Kelly and Christy's 3 year old twins and baby, we had 5 kids ages 3 and under. We went everywhere with 3 strollers. And I NEVER got used to the looks people gave us walking past, I loved it! We'd roll out of elevators one after another after another and hear, "GOOD GRIEF!" when they thought we were out of earshot. At one point Kelly and Greg wandered off somewhere leaving Christy and I with Marty and the 5 kids, and we all felt the need to yell to everyone, "We are NOT from Colorado City!"

The world's largest TV

We had to do a buffet while we were there, of course, so we went to the Main Street casino buffet.

We stayed at the Circus Circus casino hotel, which was a blast for me because I had never been to a circus.

An amazing juggler
Trapeze artist

We got there way early so we could have good seats for the show. The kids were so patient and absolute angels. Of course that's just because we had a secret weapon...
Uncle Greg!

They have this gigantic dome with all sorts of rides. I had never been on an indoor roller coaster before, and it was way better than Marty and I were expecting.

And here's Kelly and Christy getting ready for their ride!

The kids chose to do the airplane ride. Brynn always wants to ride on the carousel at the mall, and the couple of times we've let her she's gotten really afraid and wants to get off. I figured the airplanes would be a disaster since once the ride starts, the kids just have to deal with it.

Judging from the following two pictures, would you say Brynn loved it, or hated it?

Well, Brynn hammed it up and waved to crowd during the ride. and the tears are not tears of fear, but tears that the ride had to come to and end. Way to go Brynnie, you are getting braver every day! And I wasn't terribly bothered by the little tantrum at the end of the ride. We put all the kids in the same room to sleep at night so the grown-ups could stay up and play games. Needless to say, that's the least amount of sleep Brynn has ever had in her life. And we couldn't have been happier for her - cousins are supposed to stay up giggling together until all hours of the night!

And then quite a change of feeling - we also visited the Las Vegas Temple.

We took the kids swimming, even though it was a little cold.

But they loved it!

We are probably Las Vegas' worst tourists. We took advantage of every free activity we could (which are PLENTIFUL) and of course didn't spend a dime in the casinos. It was a quick trip, only two nights, and the first day was shorter than we had anticipated because it took us two and a half hours to move five miles at Hoover Dam. And even though we were very sad to say good-bye to family, we were not too sad to say good-bye to Las Vegas. After just a short time in Sin City, our eyes were burning out of their sockets (if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about) and our spirits were ready for the refuge of our sacred home. But anyway, it was a WONDERFUL vacation - thanks, Johnsons!