Cade's Senior Pictures!

 It's time for all things Senior! Cade really wanted to incorporate his trombone and Mt. Rainier into his senior pictures, and luckily I knew just the person. A friend in our ward is an amazing photographer and she was willing to trek the trails in Mt. Rainier National Park to find the best spots to make these memorable shots! Here's just a few of my favorite. Let me know if you're interested in having the link to the full gallery!

Bear Lake!

In honor of my mom's upcoming 70th birthday and retirement she really wanted to have her children and grandchildren together. This was going to be the first time we've had everyone together since 2016, and we were still missing Valerie's husband, Marcus. These kids are starting to head off to college so who knows when we'll all be together again! We decided on a VRBO in Bear Lake, Utah!

We took advantage of that massive lake by spending one day on the boat and one day at the beach!

For boat day we rented a pontoon boat for 5 hours which ended up being pretty much the perfect amount of time for us. It allowed us to explore, pull the kids in tubes, stop for lunch and swimming, and then a little more tubing before we headed back to shore.

Here's some tubing shots! The pontoon boat was fast enough to knock most of us off at one point, but Cade and Kyle held on the longest, with Kyle being the winner for never taking the plunge.

When we took a little lunch and swimming break Valerie and Emma relaxed in some tubes while the boys played king of the hill on the 3-person tube.

We dedicated a separate day for just hanging at the beach since we knew we'd be tired from boating. Because I wanted to rent a stand up paddle board we opted to go to a portion of the beach that had rentals nearby. We set up our canopies and enjoyed the day!

For a non-water day, we decided to head to the Logan temple early one morning for a baptism session. It's not going to be very often that all of us are together and can share in temple experiences, so this was a must! And the Logan temple is just so beautiful, along with the drive through Logan Canyon.

After a morning trip to Logan, we left the afternoon open for getting some lunch and exploring other parts of Bear Lake! We ate lunch at Zipz, famous for burgers and raspberry shakes and split up. Some of us relaxed at the cabin, some did some souvenir shopping and a few of the boys went to an adventure park that had a ropes course, axe throwing and an alpine slide.

You might notice our awesome matching shirts! No reunion is complete without them, and some group pictures! I didn't include all the iterations of groupings, but here's all of us, and the my mom with her children (and the photographer photobomb!)

That evening we surprised my mom with a little retirement party. We took a moment to sing some karaoke, let the kids jam on their instruments and have some cake!

On our last evening we went to the local theater for dinner and a show! It was a fun night out.

And last but not least, some pictures of our time at the cabin! There was just enough down time to allow for plenty of eating, relaxing and game playing!

Lots of Jackbox games were played!

View of the cabin from the front

View of Bear Lake from the porch!

It was such a great trip- just the right length where you want to stay longer but you know if you do it might just be too much. Happy early Retirement and 70th Birthday mom!