Wendy and Woody Visit (but not Buzz)

Last week Robert's Aunt Wendy and Cousin Woody came to visit us. Every time I would tell Julia they were coming to visit she would ask "and Buzz?" Luckily she wasn't too disappointed that Buzz didn't come as well. Wendy and Woody had both been to D.C. before so we got to accompany them to some of the less visited places in the D.C. area.

Saturday we went to the Newseum (ie. News Museum) in D.C. It is a a private museum so it costs money. For you future D.C. visitors I would say there are plenty of cool things that are free to see in D.C. so if you're not here for very long go ahead and skip this one. But, if you have some spare time, there are really cool things here. They have an exhibit with a section of the Berlin wall, an exhibit with the antennae from one of the World Trade Center Towers, newspaper front pages from some of the biggest events in history, and a really nice view of the Capitol building (and more).

On President's Day we drove out to Gettysburg, the site of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. We learned a lot about the battle. I was amazed at just how much detail historians know about the battle; they know every major move made during the three days of battle down to the minute. It was really cool to hear about it as we were seeing right where it all look place.

We also finally made it out to the other Air and Space Museum located about 40 minutes outside of D.C. by Dulles Airport. This is where they keep all the planes and space artifacts that don't fit into the museum in D.C. Some of the cool things there are the Enola Gay(dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, its the large silver plane in the picture with Wendy, Julia and I), a SR-71 Blackbird (the fastest jet in the world), and the Space Shuttle Enterprise.

Christmas 2010

We spent our Christmas vacation in Utah this year and had a great time.

On Christmas Eve we had a big family party with my mom's family. We had dinner, sang Christmas carols, had a pinata, danced, and played basketball. Julia loved the pinata. After her turn was over I had to pick her up so she wouldn't run in the way of the people hitting the pinata. I would let her down in between turns and she would take her little spoon and run up to the pinata and hit it again. We spent Christmas Day at my parent's house relaxing and happy to have all my family together for Christmas.

After Christmas we had my Grandpa Sandberg's funeral. He has not been in good health for a long time, so his passing was not a surprise. In fact, I think I was almost more happy for him to out of pain and back in heaven with my grandma than sad. We will miss him, but he lived a long fulfilling life and it was time for him to go back to our Heavenly Father.

He was a Korean War Veteran so we had a military funeral for him. All his sons and grandsons in the military wore their military dress uniforms, his coffin was draped with an American flag, a bugler played Taps, and the Panguitch Honor Guard gave a gun salute.

It was snowing during the entire graveside service.

After the funeral and luncheon we had a white-knuckle drive back home in a giant snow storm and then the next day headed up to Park City to be with Robert's family. We had opened our presents in Arlington before we left, so by the time Christmas came around Julia felt like a pro. She wanted to help everyone else open their late Christmas presents at the cabin.
Julia and Tyler are so cute together. I'm glad she has a cousin her age to play around with. Everything one of them did, they both had to do. We took them out in the snow a couple times and neither of them were crazy about it but they were at least calm when they sat together in the sled.
We had a Wheat family Olympics, but only ended up having two events, Memory (the game) and Ultimate Sledding (meaning slide down the hill and race back up). Robert and I won both the events, so I guess we are the Gold Medal winners! The second event kicked our butts. This is me collapsing at the finish line, which I think everyone did at the end. It was a big hill and the air was just so thin we could all hardly breathe.
Robert had fun carving a couch out of the five feet of snow on the back porch, but first he had to shovel off all the rest of the snow on the porch.
And of course we had fun snowmobiling and snowshoeing. This is Robert going through some fresh powder (which he had to do a lot of to make us a trail all the way into the cabin).

I ♥ NYC

Well, not so much actually. I thought it was gloomy, crowded, and dirty. But we did go there over Thanksgiving so I am going to blog about it even though it's been a month and a half. And, for the record, I thought it was pretty cool to see all the sights. I just would probably never go back and definitely would never want to live there.

Here's some of what we did.

Statue of Liberty. The one thing I really wanted to see in New York, it's such an American icon. We went up to the base and got to see the inside of the old lady and the spiral staircase going up to the crown. Even Julia was impressed by looking up.

Ice skating at Rockerfeller Center. None of us were very good at it, but we took a couple rounds around the rink. In the picture is Robert in the front and Jen and Tyler just coming around the corner.
Robert and I went to a taping of the the David Letterman show. Before the show we went over to the Hello Cafe (the owner is occasionally featured on the show) to get a bite to eat. Before the show they tell you to just laugh at all the jokes, even if you don't think its funny. I have to admit, I did a lot of fake laughing because the show wasn't all that funny. But it was very interesting. The only guest was Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta, the man who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He seemed like a very nice, regular guy.

Here's a clip from the show.

Philadelphia

Over Thanksgiving we headed up to Philly before taking a bus up to New York. We forgot to take our camera so we don't have a lot of pictures, just what was on Robert's phone. This time in Philly we saw Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and the Liberty Bell. Julia and I and Dave and Tyler sat out the presentation in Independence Hall and blew bubbles in the hallway instead.

Afterwards we went out to Valley Forge again.

Supreme Court Building

I'm finally getting the rest of our Thanksgiving pictures together. This one made me laugh.

And these ones were just pretty. Robert took these ones of the Supreme Court building while I went to Costco with his mom and the babies to get our food for Thanksgiving.