Here’s the group. (Megan’s family was not in attendance.)
The children:
The grandchildren:
We also did some old photo recreations, but since I don’t have the originals we were recreating, it doesn’t make much sense to post the new ones. If someone in the family gets those to me, I’ll put them up.
On August 2 we took Heather and Addie to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary for a day camp. They got to feed some koi, took a puppy for a walk, fed it treats, and toured their medical facility. I sat on the patio and took pictures of hummingbirds.
After lunch we drove out to Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. We parked, got everyone sunscreened, walked out to the dunes, and a storm rolled through. So we huddled under the observation platform and watched the storm.
On August 1 we had a reservation to visit Antelope Canyon outside of Page, Arizona.
So I, Jess, and the girls headed off early to visit Glen Canyon Dam on our way.
In this picture, Corinne refuses to look at the camera and Jess has just poked Heather in the eye with her sunglasses, but doesn’t realize it yet:
After our dam tour we headed in to Page for lunch and ice-cream at Slackers. Then it was out to the staging area for our Antelope Canyon tour. We got there, the rest of the family arrived, and then it started pouring, thundering, and lightning-ing. Then, after we all got flash-flood warning alerts on our phones, they canceled the tour. So no Antelope Canyon for us. Which was frustrating as I had booked it something like 6 months ago and was looking forward to it.
After being rained out at Antelope Canyon we needed to come up with something else to do. We decided to take a look at what’s left of Old Paria–a ghost town that my family visited when I was growing up that has since been burned down by vandals. On the drive back up in to Utah we stopped at Big Water Visitor Center to let the girls out for a bit. It was closed, but had some outdoors exhibits we could still look at about dinosaurs and the geological history of the area.
We got to the trailhead for Old Paria just as the rest of the group was heading in, so we joined up with the back of the caravan.
The dirt road was in decent shape most of the way out to a picnic area. We did have to cross one wash, but it was manageable even with 2-wheel-drive minivans, but then the road crosses the river bed which was not going to happen in our vehicles. So we parked there and walked.
(The guy in the green shirt isn’t with our group.)
Here’s us sort of recreating an old picture from when my family visited the same Paria Cemetery when I was growing up. If someone gets me that picture I’ll put it up too, but I don’t have it.
It started raining with some thunder while we were at the cemetery. So we turned around to head back to the vehicles.
Our family vacation this year was a road trip across across Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, and Idaho (and necessarily crossing Nevada to return home).
On July 29 we met up with most of the rest of my family outside of Zion National Park for a family reunion which was originally planned as a retirement celebration for Dad.
We all stayed in a vacation rental out past the east entrance of the park. Lots of room for cousins to run around.
On July 31st we went in to Zion National Park, briefly. We drove in, parked, got on the shuttle, and rode it up to the Narrows station. We let the girls play in the water at the mouth of the Narrows for a little while.
Then we hopped back on the shuttle with the intent of doing one of the short, child-friendly hikes. Instead, Corinne completely overheated and we stopped at the lodge in order to find some air conditioning and get her cooled down again. After which we decided we better just get heading back to the house. So that was our trip to ZNP. Better luck next time.
Today, the Mormon Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) excommunicated Bishop Sam Young. A man whose “crime” was his “persistent aggressive efforts to persuade others to support [his cause of protecting children]”.
His cause has been to ask the Mormon Church to end its policy of holding 1-on-1 interviews between untrained clergy in which sexually explicit questions have been asked of children as young as 8.
He began this protest when he learned from his adult daughters the types of things they had been asked as children. He has collected stories from thousands of people on how these interviews have caused them harm: http://protectldschildren.org/.
His request has been for the Church to simply stop conducting 1-on-1 interviews with children and to stop allowing Church leaders to ask children sexually explicit questions. That is all.
The Church’s response was to excommunicate Sam for publicly opposing them.
Will you accept your children being taken into a private room with an untrained adult male to be asked questions such as:
“Do you masturbate?”
“When was the last time you watched pornography?”
“What color were your panties?”
“Did you like it?”
And more from Sam’s compiled list of 29 Questions that have been asked in these interviews: https://invisiblescubit.wordpress.com/20…/…/08/29-questions/
From that list of 29 questions, I have personally been asked at least 7 of them by Church leaders at Brigham Young University while I was a student there. At BYU not participating in such interviews risks you being expelled from school by having your ecclesiastical endorsement revoked.
Read the words that Sam and his wife spoke in his defense at his excommunication hearing: https://invisiblescubit.wordpress.com/…/tribunal-testimoni…/. Tell me those are the words of an apostate, gripped by Satan.
Visit Sam’s website, http://protectldschildren.org/ and tell me those are stories that can be ignored because God needs these practices to continue.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to require that untrained, unpaid, local leaders call children into their offices in private and ascertain their sexual purity. By their policies, only if the child demands it will a second adult be included in the room.