Bryce Canyon, Day 2

The next morning Ephraim woke up too early again, but I managed to get him to go back to sleep. So Jacob got out of bed before Ephraim and got to go to breakfast alone with Daddy.

Joe had to go to his conference a little earlier, so I ended up taking all the kids with me to breakfast. It went pretty well. I was having a pretty good day... but how could you have a bad day when you wake up to this:

Isn't Amelia a cutie pie?

When I got everyone ready to go I realized that Joe had ended up with my keys to the van. I texted him and he told me that he did have the van keys. So the boys and I got to walk over to the conference center where Joe was. It was windy, so I ended up carrying Amelia in her carseat the entire way.

So I didn't really mind when on the way we stopped for a minute to check out the old cars and trucks that were sitting off the side of the road. The boys thought they were pretty cool.

They each had to take a turn "driving" the old truck. If you can't tell, we had to walk the equivalent of a couple of blocks to get to where Joe was.

We met up with Joe at the conference center and got the van keys. Then we got to walk all the way back to the hotel. To make it more fun, we went to the gift shop at Ruby's Inn and visited Old Bryce Town. There I finally found a place to keep the boys.

I sent the picture to Joe and he said that was great because now he and I could go hiking by ourselves. Hooray!

Unfortunately the boys got loose and tried to make a getaway. Luckily for me, they were getting nowhere fast... there must have been something wrong with their pony.

Amelia was being pretty good the entire time. Especially as she was stuck in her car seat. Here is a picture of all three of the kids at Old Bryce town.

By the time we got back to the hotel, I was the one who needed a rest! Phew! Instead we had lunch. Then we went to look at a train that was not far from the hotel. It was what I originally told the boys we would do that morning.

Looking at the train didn't take too long. Then we did something else I promised the boys we would do... we went swimming in the hotel pool.

Our room looked out onto the swimming pool, and the boys had been gazing at it  longingly ever since we arrived. It was about time for Amelia to take a nap, so I put her in her carseat and went to the pool with the boys. They were lucky because she behaved while we played in the pool for over an hour. The boys both had a great time. Jacob was swimming underwater again in no time and Ephraim kept me pretty busy in the pool.

By the time we finished it was after 3:00 pm. So we went back to our room and I made both the boys lay down. We were going to do family pictures later in the evening, so I wanted them to be rested and well-behaved.

Swimming did the trick because even Jacob fell asleep!

We met up with Daddy for dinner and ended up going to Subway because the hotel restaurant was too busy. Then we headed out to take family pictures... but that is a post in and of itself!