Baby Adam Baby Pics

A great friend of Amy's took some baby pictures of Adam.  What a gift!!!  You can see the pictures HERE!

More pics of Adam

Taufa is the name of a dear friend from Australia... Bishop Taufa.

William didn't want to hold Adam at first but on the second day and beyond can't get enough.

Finally a complete Basketball team!

Adam Taufa Bennion

Just after being born.

The boys LOVE holding Adam and giving him kisses

So do the uncles and Aunt

Two handsome guys!

Leaving some of our favorite people...last days in Oz

We met up for dinner at a park with a few families about a week before we left.

Dallin and Ezra Pukeroa with William



Burke, Soren, Arshae and Ezra Pukeroa. They are all great kids.



Don with some of the guys at our place watching the State of Origin Rugby game. These guys gave Don the rugby shirt he is wearing as a going away gift.



Having dinner with the girls, my best friends in Australia. Feofaaki, Akiko, me, Natalie and Ramona. Oh, and being convinced to try sticky date pudding for dessert. I was scared, but it was one of the most delicious desserts I've ever had. It's really a cake, not pudding, and it is covered with a caramel sauce...highy recommended.



Don with the Young Men he worked with for the year we were in Australia.





Two nights before we left, our ward had an Aussie Culture night, filled with Australian food, Australian music, Australian poems, etc, etc. It was the most perfect way to end our time down under.



Some of the munchies...white bread spread with vegemite, Tim Tams, and meat pies. Meat pies=very so so, vegemite=only Soren liked it, Tim Tams=delicious!



Don and I provided one act of entertainment with the song "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport". We had a ton of fun doing it, it is a great song.

I tried to post a video of this, but it didn't work. Maybe my favorite part of the night was the 40 minutes down time we had while technical difficulties were being worked through...in true, laid-back Aussie style, everyone just chilled and talked and all of the kids danced on the stage to the loud music that was playing. Ward parties weren't always planned perfectly to a T, and didn't always run without any bumps, but they were some of the best parties we've ever been to.

Just a cute picture in matching pj's and carseats.

At the airport:

William and Ocean Pukeroa: best mates and first kisses

Ramona Pukeroa, me and Natalie Sengchanh

Don and Jush Pukeroa

One of the saddest times of our life was leaving Australia. We had such amazing friends and an amazing ward...we miss you all!

Sydney Opera House

Three days before we left Sydney, I finally got to go on a tour of the Sydney Opera House. My good friend Eisha Swinton called and told me I had to go before I left so she was going to meet me downtown and watch my kids for me out on the grounds while I did the tour. She is great and I am so glad I accepted her generous offer. I had already been to the opera house with Don when we went to see La Traviata in March (which was AMAZING!!), but I loved going on the tour and hearing all of the information about the construction, finances, structure, etc. It was fascinating.









William, Soren, Mary, Burke and Thomas (Olivia was at school)



Maybe it's weird that I took a picture of this (this was before the tour started, the bathrooms weren't actually on the tour :)!) but aren't the bathrooms pretty cool?

The reason the Sydney Opera House can have such an interesting unique shape is because it is really buildings withing buildings. So for example, in this picture you can see that the shape of the outer shell doesn't affect the shape of the inner building, which in this picture is the opera theater. The opera theater and concert hall of course have to have a certain shape for acoustical reasons, but since the inner and outer building structures don't even actually touch each other, the outside can have that iconic shape.
The architect, Jorn Utzon, is from Denmark, so of course having lived there, it made the building even more unique and special for me to see. There were some fallings-out in the middle of the construction and Utzon left the project before the building was completed. Even though he lived for many more years (something like 20-30 years more) Utzon never came back and saw the opera house finished. So sad. There was a reconciliation late in Utzon's life, though, and the tour guide said any repairs or improvements to the Opera House in the future will all be done to the specifications of Utzon's original plans.

So I didn't have to leave Eisha with all five kids, and so I could have some company, and because it was free for him, I took William with me on the tour. Could there be a more beautiful backdrop for the building? This is Sydney Harbour with the Harbour Bridge in the background.

This was the one room they let us take a picture of inside. This is the concert hall.

Back outside after the tour...William in front of a humongo tree.

These two monkeys climbing a really fun tree. Will was making me a little nervous I have to admit. I love this picture of Mary.

Me with my kids as we are heading home. You can tell how much my kids are just awe-struck by the opera house...I think they enjoyed climbing the trees ten times more.

Eisha and two of her kids. Thanks for a great day Eisha!!

Kangaroo Valley and Jervis Bay

I wrote this post about three months ago, and apparently forgot to post it; so finally, here it is.





We rented this cheap little trailer home (advertised as a cabin) on an RV site. It was so cheap and the kids thought it was the funnest place they have ever slept. Kids are the best! Easily satisfied.





This little rectangle "cabin" had a queen bed, triple bunks, a mini-kitchen, a table and a bathroom. Everything you need, who's complaining? Obviously not these guys.




When we checked in they gave us a free movie, and a bag of feed to feed the goats and pakas (which are just like llamas.) The kids also loved this.





The next morning we woke up to heavy fog at the bottom of the valley. After a bakery breakfast (I'm going to miss bakeries when we come back to the US!) we drove up the mountains to go to a waterfall hike. (No strollers this time!) We stopped along the way up the mountain and took these pictures of the valley and the fog below.











The next day we spent at Jervis Bay, a couple hours down the coast south of Sydney.


Jervis Bay is in the Guiness Book of World Records for having the whitest sand in the world....who knew?

We took a whale watching cruise. They advertised they had seen three whales the day before, and even though it was very very early in the whale watching season, we decided to take our chances. We did see a whale! We saw it three times, about 1 second each time. Too quick for a picture. Too bad. They say in June-August, it is great. The humpback whales in particular stay up at the surface for a long time. We had fun anyway!

A fun weekend. It sometimes feels weird to plan vacations by ourselves, make the hotel reservations, pay for the hotel, decide where we want to go. It makes me feel like a real adult. We love our little vacations we get to take with our family.

Hot Air Ballooning in Binalong

Don's coworker Andrew Robertson, invited our family to go with his family (wife Katherine and son James) to their cabin three hours south of Sydney, in a teeny little sheep farming town called Binalong. Andrew's family has tons of land there and an old charming cabin that was built for his grandmother. We stayed for the three day weekend. The Robertson family has long time been involved with hot air ballooning, and Andrew has competed all over the world in many hot air balloon competitions. With all the wide open spaces, Binalong is the perfect town to go hot air ballooning in as well.

It was a great weekend including one rainy day where we got to chill out inside. This was the first day and being inside also gave ample time for our boys to get used to their dog Ellie. William and Burke are notoriously afraid of dogs, crying and screaming like schoolgirls every time one passes them on the sidewalk. So I was a little worried about how they would be all weekend. Ellie was the perfect dog. She is pretty calm and really likes to be petted. I think by the end of the first day all of my boys were in love with the dog. We even had to ask William to stop petting her and give her a break. If Ellie would try to walk into another room, William would just follow her and keep petting her. While she ate, Will tried to pet her. Don and I were so glad to get our boys comfortable around a dog! Here's to hoping that at least some of that will carry over to other dogs.

Here is Ellie, Kath, me and Burke on a hike we took one afternoon up to the top of a hill. Everyone who climbs the hill has to add a rock to the big pile in the background.

Here is the cabin we stayed at...with fields upon fields surrounding it.

Here is their son James, 7, reading a night time story to our boys. James is a great kid, very kind, and our boys had a blast with him.

There was a sheep shearing station next door that we went to visit. They weren't actually shearing at the time, but we got to see all the tools and as seen below, lots of extra wool.

These friendly little moths were everywhere! They are taller and much wider than my fingers as you can see. The day after the rain, there were tons and tons of them dead in the street, too. Yum.

Monday morning we woke up at 5:45 to get going. This is Don and Andrew getting the balloon set up. Kath is behind the top of the balloon. She is amazing at all of this, too. She works hard and is really fast. She tracks and follows the balloon very well. It isn't as easy as it looks. So Katheryn and James were in the front car following the balloon. Don and I took turns in the balloon, and the other of us were in a second car with our kids, following Kath. Andrew has a GPS hooked into a laptop up in the balloon, and we all have radios to keep in contact with eachother so we can meet up at the landing point to pack everything up and put it in the trailer.

A picture of our whole family with Andrew and James as well.

And we're off! I took the first turn and you can kind of see me waving to everyone down below.

A shot lookind down at the cars we had just left behind.

I thought it was so cool to see our shadow on the ground below.

Looking down at some of the thousands of sheep we saw from up in the air. We also saw cows and horses. And we even saw some kangaroos and wallabies jumping through the fields. Hot air balloons are noisy and it scared them a bit. They were moving pretty fast, trying to get away from us.

Don in action