New Jersey

Right after Christmas, we headed out to New Jersey for our nephew/cousin's baptism.  I think the kids had been looking forward to this trip even more than they had looked forward to Christmas.

It was an uneventful drive over.  The kids were entertained with dvd's, books, music and video games and Kalen and I got a lot of reading done.

After arriving, we got to take a drive to northern New Jersey to visit the Thomas Edison State Park.  It was a hit with the adults.  Not so much with the kids.  We got to tour his actual workshop--three stories of interesting things--and it was so fascinating.  The kids filled out a paper as they went along so that they could become Junior Rangers at the end of the day.

Lynnsey in one of the labs.

This was my favorite room--a library/offices.  I loved all the old fashioned furniture and dark wood shelves and floors.

Becoming Junior Rangers.

Edison's chemistry building.

A replica of the old silent movie studio that Edison created.

And then the most exciting part of the day happened when Nana and some of the uncles arrived!

Kaya was thrilled to be reunited with Timothy.

We had a second Christmas celebration.  We had drawn the Bramhall's name for Christmas but decided since we were heading out that way, we would save on shipping costs and just bring their gifts to them.  So my mom decided to do the same thing with her gifts for all of us.  In the end, we all had at least one or two gifts to open.

We took another trip to downtown Philadelphia to see the Macy's light show.  It wound up being incredibly stressful when we ended up having to split up to look for street parking and we all lost each other and had to figure out where we were supposed to meet up. It did end up being fun, but Kalen says we'll never do that again!  Our favorite part of the day was when Mike drove us to the site of the new Philadelphia temple and we drove around the block.  It was still mostly just concrete, but it is going to be amazing!

 Unfortunately, the main event and sole purpose of our trip, Bentley's baptism, was the one time I left the camera behind. It was a beautiful baptism though.  The older I get, the more I love going to kid's baptisms.  It amazes me that children so young can have such strong testimonies of the gospel.  I was one of the speakers--kind of last minute so I just recycled the talk I gave at one of my primary kid's baptisms and fine tuned it to Bentley.  I'm so glad that we were able to be there for such a big milestone.

We had a really awesome game night to celebrate New Year's Eve. And then we all watched the ball drop and toasted the New Year with soda.

We hated saying goodbye so soon, so to make it a little easier on the kids we decided to take a little side trip to Hershey Park.  The amusement park was closed for winter but we went on the indoor chocolate ride where they show all the different steps to making Hershey chocolate.  And we bought souvenirs in the gift shop.

Then it was back in the car for the long ride home.  We were slowed terribly by a major snowstorm and finally arrived in the middle of the night to a whole bunch of snow where we settled in for the longest winter I have ever experienced.