City of Beautiful

The last weekend in May, Becca, Isak and I visited the City of Beautiful, Nauvoo, with my family. We camped at the state park across the street from Historic Nauvoo for two nights. The timing was perfect because it was early enough in the summer that the weather was nice and Nauvoo was uncrowded, but late enough that the summer schedule had just started.

We enjoyed the shows. This one was Just Plain Anna Amanda, the children's show.




In the evening they did a variety show on the outdoor stage. Before the show began children were invited to arrive early and make hats to wear in a parade. The performers were all there to interact with the children and help them decorate their hats.






When the parade began Isak suddenly decided that he wasn't interested in participating.


Instead he sat on my lap and watched the parade. Within minutes he was asleep in my lap. Poor guy was exhausted! Here are Becca and her cousin, Emma right at the front of the parade.


We hit the hightlights in Historic Nauvoo - the places that would be most interesting for our little ones. Here are Becca, Isak and Emma at the well behind the bakery and some of us enjoying the rope making demonstration.














And here is my brother, Joe, putting our rope to good use. There was a pretty steep hill up to our campsite. None of us were able to manage riding up the hill on our bikes. Joe had the clever idea to have us tow him up the hill.



On our last day we packed up camp and headed to the temple to take some pictures.










At the risk of making this post too long and losing my audience, I want to share a story from our weekend. It is a cute, and kind of silly story of a child's faith.

Early in the weekend the kids were playing around the campsite, and for whatever reason Isak took off one of his shoes. Yes, just one. He walked around for a couple of hours with one shoe on and the other off. As we were preparing to leave the campsite that day I asked Isak to put on his other shoe. He couldn't find it. In the interest of time, I pulled out his other pair of shoes and decided that we would find the missing shoe later.

Over the course of the weekend the missing shoe never appeared. I was particularly frustrated because we had just purchased the pair of shoes a week or so earlier. So as we were packing up to leave on the last day I gave Isak, Becca and Emma the task of finding Isak's shoe.

After I got some of my things packed up I went to take a shower. When I returned from showering the shoe had been found, but not without a prayer and a bit of a surprise.

My sister-in-law, Claire had taken the kids into "the forest" (the trees surrounding our camp site) to look for the shoe. After looking for a while the kids were a little distraught that they hadn't found the shoe, so Becca suggested that they say a prayer (that's my girl!). Becca said the prayer and they all went back to the tent area to continue the search for the shoe. At about that time my sister's family was taking down their tent. As they folded it up they discovered, smack dab in the middle of where their tent had been pitched, Isak's shoe!

Becca was thrilled that her prayer had worked and I too was grateful to Heavenly Father for answering her sweet prayer in such a simple way. I know that Becca felt her Heavenly Father's love for her that day and it was a lesson on faith that she will not soon forget.

I was, of course, happy that the shoe had been found. But, most of all, we were all a little confused as to how the shoe ended up so far underneath the Schroering's tent and found it a little curious that none of the Schroering family were bothered by the big lump under their tent as they slept!

It was a fun weekend, but it wasn't without it's problems. Isak, who got a little over-tired and who struggles a little bit with using public restrooms, had several potty accidents. Because he has been potty trained for...well, a long time, he was quite frustrated over the situation, and each time he had an accident he screamed and cried and completely stressed his mommy out! By the end of the trip he was out of clean clothes and had to ride home in underwear that we stopped and bought at WalMart and one of Emma's shirts, sitting atop garbage bags and paper towels that we aquired from a kind and helpful gas station attendant. It took a while to recover from that trip as I had a lot of laundry to do, including taking the urine-soaked sleeping bags to the laundromat. Not fun!

But, we survived, and for the most part had a very enjoyable weekend. We missed Jeremy, who was unable to go with us because he left that same weekend to meet his dad in Hong Kong. I will invite him to share his travel experiences. He was gone for about 10 days and visited Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan. I remind him frequently that he owes me big time for letting him take that trip!