Boy am I glad I did. The first day was better than I expected and it just got better every minute. The week was full of pageant miracles, we called them, and we just kept marvelling at how well everything went.
- The stroller, which definitely had a broken and unusable seatbelt, somehow was miraculously fixed the Monday morning we left for pageant.
- The kids never, NEVER complained about going to the pageant and working all day in the hot sun.
- No one ever complained about lack of sleep or being too tired to continue even though we were getting up at 6 or 7am and not getting home till 11 or 12 at night, or later.
- I have bad feet....tendonitis and a heel spur in one foot as well as just always having sore feet from standing up for very long. I made it through each day!! That's a miracle.
- Henry was an angel. I carried him around in the sling all day. He took naps in it too. He was so agreeable and people kept saying "what a good baby, he's so quiet" and I would think "yes, he is a good baby, but I don't know who this kid is!"
- Henry was teething and never acted like it.
- Even though rainstorms occurred each day of performance, the rain cleared up and we were still able to perform.
Audrey getting her hair done by a fellow cast member who played Emma Smith
Me and Emma, turning over some of the dirt from the amphitheatre ground breaking ceremony
The ground breaking ceremony with some cast members, the producer, and the director (in the white wig)
Sheila, the costume mistress, displaying her Don't-Eat-In-Your-Costumes face
the view from the stage
Austin and Audrey on stage during a break
Emma, waiting in the lovely air conditioned Ruritan Club, showing off the lyrics to the two songs that most of the cast sing
Thomas during a break, stage in the background
Emma, showing one of the many shark teeth she and the other kids kept finding in the gravel
Uncle Tony rehearsing one of the Lamanite/Nephite battle scenes
Rick storming the stage as a Lamanite warrior
Thomas returning from one of his many adventures around the amphitheatre grounds
Audrey preparing to practice the minuet, part of one of the Colonial scenes
This ship is used during the Blackbeard show, but when not in use is a play place for the kids
We took our pop up camper to use as a respite from the hot sun during the day. Here Henry is in his playpen in the camper, taking a much needed crawling break.
Is Madison suffering from sun exposure madness? No, just being silly during lunch break in the camper
More lunch break
One of the best things about pageant week? The scene where the Savior visits the American continent and blesses the people. Austin got to play a crippled boy. Here's he's being healed by Jesus.
Audrey also got to play an important part in that scene by being of the people who gets to go up and touch the Savior's hands
Our family dressed up in Colonial garb before one of the performances
The Joseph Smith funeral scene. Henry and I are on the far left.
Rick, as John Taylor, singing some of the verses to "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief" during the scene where we mourn the death of Joseph Smith
Henry and I getting some extra stage direction from Ivan, the director (you can see Emma behind him)
What a great experience. We are definitely doing this again next year. We used this week as a family vacation, making the sacrifice to take time off from Rick's work, and we are so glad we did. It was worth it, and we all had a fantastic time building our testimonies, meeting new friends, and having fun. We have so many precious memories from the pageant. I can't wait to make more next year.
I love the look on his face here.
Ladies and gentlemen, the end result. A happy, tired baby with wrinkly feet.
We ate those berries, knowing that we didn't have time to make jam then but that we would return with a couple of weeks for a jam run. Well, the one week that was dedicated to jam got sabotaged with sickness. I got a horrible cold. This was tragic because it meant the only jam week left was the last week of berries. But we went out to the fields anyway this past week. Such a change from our first visit. Little puny berries. And it took us forever just to pick the two flats pictured, and then they weren't even full.
So we had to go straight from the fields to Sam's to get supplemental berries. Sam's also had some great blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries so we picked up some of each with plans to make Triple Berry Jam with Rosemary. Of course, then I had to go to Kroger to get some fresh rosemary (and also some eggs because the stinkin' snake is eating all our chicken eggs!....I HATE buying eggs!).
