This is the place!!

We spent a week in Utah with Ryan's parents and got to go to the Spanish Fork Rodeo, which was a blast! None of us had been before so we had no idea what to expect.

We celebrated Pioneer Day! this is us and Michelle's kids and Grandma waiting at the parade, where, by the way, each kid only got 2 pieces of candy. I guess parades just aren't like they used to be. I remember getting tons of candy when I was a kid.

We saw lots of other family! this is our cousin Michael, who is at BYU. we haven't seen him in 10 years! also got to see other cousins, Jesse and Alayna, but I didn't have a pic of them.

Went to Seven Peaks with our Tokyo friends, the Mylries. They moved away last Christmas and Trent was SO excited to see Vanya, his best friend again. It was really fun.

I had some time alone with the kids in Salt Lake before our flight back to Tokyo. We toured temple square. This was the first time we had been in the conference center. it's huge!

On Temple Square, the kids kept looking at all the sister missionary name tags looking for the Japanese flag. Twice, we saw a Japanese missionary. the kids ran up to them, yelling "konichiwa!" and were so excited to tell them all about how we live in Tokyo etc.

We also made a quick stop at the dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point. This was our first time and it was awesome! a great museum with lots of hands on things and touching fossils. but the best thing was how you could dig for fossils in the sand with little brushes. the kids literally dug for fossils for an hour in the sand pit and I had to drag them away promising we could visit next summer.