'This is the Place' Heritage Park and Hogle Zoo in SLC

A couple of weeks ago, Jeff and I took a little trip up to Salt Lake because we had free tickets to the 'This is the Place' Heritage Park, and also free tickets to the Hogle Zoo. We had such an amazing day! Jeff and I had also signed up for a bunch of the birthday club things at various places, including Benihana in Salt Lake, so we got to go there for dinner that night together. Yay for free tickets!

Gift shop of the 'This is the Place' Heritage Park.

Our 'train' tour guide

View of the beautiful park.

Brigham Young farm house. It was gorgeous! Restored, of course.

Wood burning stove.

My grandma would FLIP if she saw this!

The upstairs.

The kitchen.

Dining room.

Jeff chillin.

Another view of the beautiful house.

Back on the 'train!'

Log cabins.

Heber C. Kimball House.

Huntsman hotel.

Cool rocks we saw in the ZCMI shop.

This place was beautiful!

They even had a trial.

Reindeer!

Just milkin a cow, no biggie.

Jeff loved the petting zoo. I, on the other hand... not so much.

Sheep.

Watch it, Jeffrey!

We even got to take a little ride on a mini train.

View from the train.

Panning for gold.

He struck it rich!

Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake.

Jeff being silly.

Rhinoceros!

Bald eagle.

This guy was awesome! He literally kept doing laps back and forth from the glass back out to that rock in the background. What a great shot.

Giraffes.

A bird.

It was super hot that day. Luckily they had monstrous fans that shot out water to cool us down. Thank goodness.

This was special.

Rooster.

Olson Family Photos

Here are some of the photos we took at our family reunion a few weeks ago down in St. George.

His dad actually took these on his phone! They turned out pretty nice.

GIANT Olson family photo.

Jeff and the rest of his siblings and his parents.

St. George Temple

4th of July!

Fourth of July this year was really fun. We had a big barbecue with some friends in our ward at one of the parks in Provo. We just had hot dogs and hamburgers and then some yummy sides. We also played games. It was fun to get to know them a bit more.

These next few pictures are not actually from the fourth, but I thought they went along well with the rest of the pictures so I just threw them together. This is from when we went to the Freedom Festival in Provo on Center Street. It was basically just a little festival thing with yummy food and crafts and animals, as you can see from the picture above. This animal guy was really funny. We got to watch some of his little show.

Here are some of the animals he introduced us to.

Freedom Festival!

They even had a magic show. And all of this stuff was FREE!

I got my face painted!

The finished product.

These are from the parade that morning.

We were trying to figure out why they had these GIANT talking heads on this float. Nevertheless, they were pretty cool.

I guess the Jetsons were having some issues. It looked like they died. How sad.

Madagascar float!

This picture needs a little explaining. So every year when I was living at home, my family had a tradition of getting KFC and then watching the fireworks together. And when I had originally told Jeff about this little family tradition, he insisted that we continue it with our new little family. He has literally been talking about going to KFC on the fourth ALL year long. All throughout the year, whenever we would pass by a KFC, he would make sure to ask me if we were still going to KFC together for the fourth of July. I reassured him that we were. He was really excited haha. 

Personally, I'm okay with some KFC. However, I really would prefer to just keep it as something we only have once a year haha.

These are just some pictures of the Bananagrams ultimate game we played together. This is one of the few exciting games that we can play as a couple, and we've become a bit addicted. Especially since we brought it to the family reunion recently, and then made his entire family addicted. They absolutely LOVED it. We love this game, too. These were Jeff's words.

Here are some of mine. We love Bananagrams! I'm pretty sure my old roommate Natalie got us addicted. It is definitely one of our favorites!

Intramural Champs/DAT

On Thursday, Jeff played in his championship intramural softball game with our married ward. It was super intense! Also, the whole season, our cheering section was basically made up of all the awesome wives of the superstar players. It has been so much fun getting to know all of these amazing girls from the ward. They are all really great!

Anyway, let's get to the good stuff haha. The game was extremely close. They had already played a game against the same team just before this one, and they lost (even though they played them only a couple of days before and had beat them by one point). So it was intense, if you could imagine. In the championship game, they were losing 5-6 in the last inning. A guy on our team (Kevin Pulsipher) pretty much saved the day and hit a home run and scored us the two points we needed at the end of the game. It was awesome! By the end of the game, all of the girls were cheering and jumping up and down like crazy because we were just so darn proud of  our awesome husbands. We even all got up and made a tunnel for our winning group of boys. It was an amazing game! Congrats to the 35th ward HOLY THROWERS!!!!!!!!!!

Also, I forgot to mention that Jeff had already played on the ward dodgeball team earlier in the semester, and they came out champions! Hence, Jeff already had an intramural champions shirt. So what was he to do, being such a swell guy? He gave his wife the other shirt he won for softball (in my size, of course). The best part is, now we have another shirt to MATCH! Haha we are excited about that.

In other news, Jeff took the DAT today. Hence, I am making a blog post because I am too nervous to do anything else (oh, besides surprise him and make cinnamon roll pancakes and sausage and eggs for when he gets home). He's been preparing for a few months (taking several practice tests, going over old test questions, spending nine LONG hours in the library studying yesterday, and for the past couple of weeks or so, etc.), and our future is basically riding on this day. No biggie or anything. So I'm doing a little more than crossing my fingers that this huge test went well for him. I am super thankful that he is an extremely hard worker, and he really goes after stuff he wants. He is an amazing husband, and I am thankful each day that I am married to him.