In the Devil's Garden region of Arches, we hiked to a couple of the closer arches. When the boys are bigger, we'll plan to do the whole Devil's Garden loop (I think it's at least 5 miles). Mitchell really loved hiking around in the front pack. The only thing he didn't care for was the wind. The second picture shows Tunnel Arch, which is where we found the un-afraid rabbit. The last picture is of Pine Tree Arch but it really doesn't do a thorough job of showing the scale of the thing.
After exploring a couple of dinosaur sites, we went to Arches where we ate lunch. All around the picnic area were fun rock formations and Sheridan was determined to climb on them all. The first picture I took from inside the car (Caleb had fallen asleep and I was feeding Mitchell)and shows Sheridan on top with Marcus just below him. 
The first picture is looking down Mill Canyon toward Determination Towers. If you look very closely, you can see the ruins of a late 1800's copper mill on far left side of the picture. The second picture shows what I thought was an amazing tree growing at the picnic area in Arches.
We decided to take advantage of the flexibility homeschooling gives us and take a quick trip to Moab. We left Provo early Thursday and drove to Copper Ridge, North of Moab. This was one of three dinosaur sites we found information for online and we managed to visit them all. We also went to Arches National Park and did several short hikes before getting to the hotel in Moab, which was the highlight of the trip for Marcus. He was quite insistent that we (and by "we" I mean Guy and the three boys) swim in the hotel pool as much as possible. Sheridan declared that it was the best trip we'd been on. "Well, at least one of the best," he ammended.
Our first stop of the day was at Copper Ridge at the end of a dirt track a couple miles off the main highway to Moab. The morning was really quite cold (especially with the wind), but we managed to spend quite a while exploring the dinosaur tracks. In the first two pictures, we're standing in the big, round sauropod footprints. Marcus is standing by a smaller therapod footprint that he found on his own. Sheridan is beside the best example of an Allosaurus footprint. You can even see the claw marks in the toes. At the trailhead, there was a box with a guestbook to sign. I got a kick out of the comment before ours from some California visitors, "cool site, but needs more footprints." Yea, we'll get the BLM working on that one right away.
Caleb and Marcus sand beside some sauropod bones at Mill Canyon, a site where there were a whole lot of fossils still in the rock, as well as some petrified wood. The other two pictures are from a site at the Poison Spider bike trailhead on Potash Rd. outside of Moab. The first shows several theropod tracks and the second has several ancient indian pictographs on it. The two were right near each other up on a high ledge (too high for us to hike to, although Sheridan wanted to try), and really cool to see.
On Sunday afternoon we gathered at my parent's house in Spingville with Deren, Liz and Drake, Marenda, Sam and Addie, our niece, Mellissa, and Great-grandma Ruth Nielson. We had an egg hunt, a delicious dinner, and good conversation. Mitchell loved having so many people around to smile at. The other picture shows Addie and my mom on the egg hunt.
Each of the kids got a chocolate bunny from my parents, and Caleb was just enthralled with his. He fell asleep on the way home, but woke up enough to ask his dad to please put the chocolate bunny by his bed. This morning when he woke up, he took it out of the package and played with it, being careful not to handle it too much to keep it from melting. He was very disappointed that his brothers didn't want to open their packages and "play chocolate bunny" with him. He even named his bunny "Chocolately" and asked me to close his blinds to make his room dark because that's how Chocolately liked it. After a while of him playing with the bunny in his room, I heard him just sobbing. When I went to him, he wouldn't talk to me he was so upset, but he had a ring of chocolate around his mouth, and "bunny" was nearby--minus the ears. I really didn't know whether to laugh or cry because he was so upset about it. After lots of hugs, and a couple of hours he announced to me that he decided it was ok to eat his chocolate bunny, and proceeded to do so without anymore tears. Now he's asking when Easter will come again so he can get another chocolate bunny. 
Marcus, Drake, Caleb, Sheridan, and Addie with their baskets after the hunt. We tried to make sure we had lots of eggs, but even so, the hunt took less than ten minutes. Below, Mellissa Rosenhan helps Caleb find a few. It turns out he probably didn't need the help--he ended up collecting the most eggs.
