August 2014 – Andelin Adventures

Minnie Mouse Obsession

We were at the mall to look at freezers, and as we walked through Sears, Lydia spotted a bed all made up with Minnie Mouse bedding. Then she went crazy. She loves Minnie Mouse! I had talked about wanting to get new bedding sets for each of the kids and so we decided to see if we could find out how much the set would cost. There were NONE on the shelf. No Minnie Mouse bedding at all. There was a Minnie Mouse pillow, but I had no interest in buying a cute pillow with no pillow case. Those are harder to wash! Kyle decided he would ask an employee about the bedding, when the one couldn’t find it on the shelf or in the back, he got someone else to help him. They searched the back again and were looking it up on the computer, including online. They couldn’t find it anywhere. So they got someone else to help them…eventually we had everyone in the bedding department trying to find a set of twin size Minnie Mouse bedding. They just never found anything. So one of them called the store manager to ask what they should do, and the manager gave them permission to sell us the set that was currently on the bed for $35. It was an AMAZING deal so we bought it! Lydia couldn’t be happier. I would say she has an obsession with Minnie Mouse, wouldn’t you?

Adam’s Second Birthday

Adam turned two, two days ago! We weren’t able to celebrate on his birthday because Kyle had some obligations at Cub Scout Roundtable so we celebrated today. I made him a chocolate cake and used minty chips and dinosaur candles to decorate it. He just loved it! Actually he probably liked the fire on the candles the most….

Reno Temple

The last place on my list of places I wanted to see on the way home, was the Reno, Nevada temple. We didn’t get out to walk around this time though because we just were not making enough progress on our journey home to be able to get home at a reasonable hour tonight. So we just made a drive by visit.

Donner Memorial State Park

Our next leg stretching stop was at the Donner Memorial State park near Truckee, California shortly before the California-Nevada border. There was a small indoor museum that had things that the Donner party most likely had with them.

It was a really small museum, only one room, so it didn’t take us very long to see it all. There was also a video that they were going to show, but we didn’t have time to stay and watch it. So we went outside to check out the monument.

The height of the monument represents the height of the snow that the Donner party got stuck in. Totally crazy to be stuck in that much snow with no shelter of any kind. I would have loved to spend more time here, but we really had to be on our way as Kyle has to go back to work tomorrow, and we did NOT want to be driving all night long. We will have to visit this place some other time and explore it further. 🙂

Sacramento Temple

Being up late last night, we didn’t get up as early as we would have liked this morning. But, also because we were out late last night we didn’t bother with unpacking the van, we just had everyone sleep in their clothes. So we were that much closer to being ready to leave this morning when we woke up. I did bring in stuff like the hair brush and diapers so we could make ourselves look decent. 🙂

We had breakfast, we finished loading the minimal stuff that we had brought in and then it was time to load up the kids and get going. We drove for awhile before making a quick stop to fill up the gas tank and use the bathroom. We knew that we would need to stop a few times to stretch legs, so we tried to pick some things that we wanted to see as our places to take a break. Our first stop along our trek home was the Sacramento Temple. The kids, especially the little ones, were glad to have the chance to be out of their car seats and to be able to move around.

I did not pose this picture. They just happened to get to the fountain and stopped to look at it, I came up behind them and snapped the picture. Like how they are all just about evenly spaced, it’s just my four girls and they are standing in order from youngest to oldest totally coincidentally?

Then because children are naturally attracted to water and fountains, the boys joined them.

Lydia went around to the other side to see if she could get close enough to touch.

The grounds were lovely, as temple grounds usually are. How sweet it was to catch Jeremy pointing out flowers to Adam. 🙂

I caught Lydia totally posing for me:

Right next to the temple there was a church building, so there were lots of cars in the parking lot, today being a Sunday. And in front of both the temple and the church building, there was this nice park. Roaming the park were some wild turkeys! We tried to get close enough to get a picture, but I think the noise of so many kids scared them off. This was as close as we got:

I just love this picture of the temple peaking through the trees: