Harvard's "Mormonism 101"

For anyone interested in an enlightening and interesting read about the Mormon faith, I recommend this talk to you which was given by Elder Dallin H. Oaks as part of an annual lecture series at Harvard Law School called "Mormonism 101".

Fundamental Premises of Our Faith - Talk Given by Elder Dallin H. Oaks at Harvard Law School - LDS Newsroom

Time away

My sweet Grandparents have been planning on going on a family cruise for their 50th anniversary ever since I can remember. Well they celebrated their 50th anniversary last month and we were so excited to celebrate it with them by going to the Mexican Riviera! In all, 17 members of my family were able to be there and we had a blast!!!

This was our wait team on the ship. They served us all week long and they were awesome! Dewa (on the right) even cried when we left. They were so sweet.

This is a picture of Cabo San Lucas. It was beautiful there!

Our second stop was Mazatlan. I think this was our favorite port because we had such a good time. We took a boat ride to a place called Stone Island. On the Island there are no hotels and no other tourists. I felt like we really got to see what Mexican life was like. It was kind of humbling seeing the conditions some of them lived in with no electricity or running water. It made me realize how many things we take for granted. But we really did have a good time there. We were able to go kayaking in the ocean, and we also got to ride on a banana boat that was being pulled by a fishing boat. Our favorite was going horseback riding along the beach. It was so much fun. The only other time I have been horseback riding before this was on a small trail where you were pretty much nose to tail with the other horses. This was much better than that!

Do you see that beautiful scenery behind us? Amazing!

There was a man walking around the beach with his iguanas so we stopped to take a look and he kept saying, "Take a picture, take a picture." So we thought, why not, and took some pictures with the iguanas. Then after we were done he said, "50 pesos." We should have known he wanted money.

On our boat ride over to Stone Island we passed right by our ship so we were able to get some great pictures of it.

Any guess why this rock is so white? Yep, it's bird droppings. Our tour guide called it a Mexican glacier.

I thought the prettiest port of all was Puerto Vallarta. I was amazed at how beautiful it was. We were able to go zip lining there which was a first for me, I was a little nervous about going zip lining in Mexico but once we got there I surprised myself by having a really good time!

After we were done zip lining they had a hut with a few animals inside. I was so excited when I found out you could actually go inside and hold them!


Here Andrew has a scorpion on his forehead, and tarantula in his hand and a python around his neck. No, thank you! Crazy man!

Here is a super cheesy picture of us sitting next to our towel animal.

So as you can tell we had a lot of fun on our cruise to Mexico and for any of you that are thinking about doing a cruise, you should DO IT! You will not regret it!

What did we miss while we were gone? Well, we missed 7 days of straight rain, a tornado warning at Carter's school but most of all we missed our three beautiful children. I don't think I could of handled another day without seeing them. I was so excited to come home to them, and then about 5 minutes later I was ready to be on the ship again. Just kidding!

Thanks a million times to my wonderful mother-in-law who was brave enough to take our kids for a whole week! We thought we were leaving her in the beautiful California sun, boy were we wrong. Thanks again, Colleen!