First Day of School, Our Style

Hooray! The first day of school!

The kids and I took a hike up Ensign Peak today. Unfortunately Jamie had to head to Wyoming for a few days and we missed him being with us, but we still made it up the hill and enjoyed the hike. I've got more object lessons from this one hike than I'll be able to use up for quite a while. One biggie I didn't even think of till we got home, "in the world, but not of the world."


While we were up there we talked about vision, mission, and goals.

We talked about the vision the men had that originally climbed there to lay out a city, and how we need to have the same kind of vision in our own lives. We talked about having a vision for our family, and looking down at the temple we talked about how we want to all be there together as a family someday.


We talked about how each of us have a mission, and that everything we do and everything we learn helps us to get closer to learning what our mission is and makes us better to accomplish it (D&C 88:77-80).


We talked about how we had the goal to make it to the top of the mountain, and even though it got hard, and sometimes people even got scared (Sammy thought he saw a snake), we helped each other, pushed on, and MADE IT. Goals can feel the same way - hard, sometimes scary, but if we keep at them we'll be all the better for it. Over the next few days we'll be laying out some of our goals for this year.


We talked about some 'schoolish' things too through it all, like erosion and wildlife (on the way down the trail Melanie said, "It's sure nice they put all this nature here!" I let her know the nature was there before the people, LOL!) and of course Utah history. We're looking to visit the capitol and council hall sometime soon.

When we got back down the hill we decided to go to the Pioneer Museum and saw a lot of great things there as well. The kids really liked seeing tangible objects that belonged to people and prophets they've learned about, including the wagon Brigham Young rode into the Salt Lake valley on. Melanie made me take a picture of the two-headed lamb, but I am so not posting that here.

Just the beginning of a great year.