Church sites

After dropping Eli off at the airport on his way to a med school interview in Vermont (keep your fingers crossed!!!!!), Tan and I headed to Salt Lake to visit some LDS church sites. It was the first cold day of the fall but it was still beautiful with all the flowers and blue skies. I am impressed at how well the church keeps up the gardens and landscaping. (I loved how BYU was the same way.) Tanner was more interested in watching the construction workers standing behind me. He also really liked watching the fountains.

Tanner was so cute when he saw the statue of Jesus. He started bouncing up and down and jabbering until I put him down. He crawled right to the base of the statue and kept reaching up toward Jesus and "talking" to him. That little act just melted my mommy heart! He didn't do that with other statues. I gave him a pass along card with a picture of Jesus on it and he carried it around all day. Can you say precious?!

I have been to the LDS Conference Center many times, but I've never taken a tour of the building. Tan and I were lucky enough to take a private tour which was so nice because I could get Tanner out of the stroller and let him crawl around whenever I needed to. The top of the building has a garden on the top and the source of the waterfalls that cascade down the side of the building. The garden isn't just a random assortment of flowers though. It is supposed to resemble what the pioneers saw when they entered the Salt Lake valley in the 1800's. You start at the highest part of the roof where there are trees sporadically planted. Then you go down steps (or a ramp in our case) where there are bushes that would have been on the foothills. After walking further down, there is prairie grass and flowers found in the valley. Pretty cool!

We also visited the Hall of the Prophets where there are paintings of all the current apostles and statue busts of the current prophet and past prophets since Joseph Smith. Tanner's favorite room was the Arnold Freiberg art room. He loved it because he had a giant room to crawl in! I loved it because most of Freiberg's original Book of Mormon paintings are there and they are really neat to see in their original form.

We visited the This is the Place monument and spent a few minutes in the visitor center because it was chilly outside.

Seeing this threw me back to childhood when I lived in Utah! These Rainbow Snow stands used to be all over during the summer time!