Jack o' Lanterns and Dinosaurs

Well we had a swell Halloween weekend. Chris and I carved pumpkins as usual. Mine are the two on the outside and Chris did the one in the middle. We also found a corn maze near Roosevelt and got lost there. It's not a great picture because of the light, but can't you just tell how much fun we were having? Our ward Halloween party was on Halloween, so I dressed myself up like a cute little witch (Chris put no effort into dressing up) and I went earlier and helped with the carnival games for the kids. My calling is the Beehive advisor and we were in charge of a booth. Chris' mom and stepdad decided to come visit us that weekend since Chris' mom didn't have school on Halloween. They got into town while the partying was still going on and came to the church and ate dinner with us. Then we went home and passed out candy to Trick or Treaters while we visited with them. This year we actually live in a place where we get Trick or Treaters, we got 0 in Spokane. Our apartment was not exactly in the greatest place and our front door was in an alley, so it was fun to give out some candy this year!

 The next day we drove to Vernal and went to a couple different dinosaur museums. I didn't know this until we moved here, but Utah is apparently the hub of dinosaur bones. Like mega hub. Like mega mega hub...well you get the picture. Apparently a lot of the dinosaur bone displays in major museums across the country came from good ol' Utah. It was a rather fascinating day. The first place we went to had lots of replicas of skeletons and a few real ones, and lots of info about what this area looked like in the days of the dinosaurs. We saw other fossils too, of plants and turtles, and such. Outside there were a bunch of statues of dinosaurs that were pretty cool to see too. And the wooly mammoth was huge! I had no idea they were that big. Way bigger than an elephant. It was like 14 feet tall.

Next we drove around out in the middle of nowhere until we found this other place, a national monument. It is a big building that is basically covering the side of a mountain where a bunch of dinosaur bones have been found, but instead of excavating them, they decided to leave them there and preserve them for all to see. It was pretty crazy. What they think happened, is that there were a bunch of dinosaurs that died at the same time, and then somehow the remains were swept up in a river and brought downstream, until they got stuck in mud and created a "logjam" of sorts. The water was strong enough to tear apart tissue so there were tails and legs and heads floating around. Gross right?! The types of dinosaurs in the logjam are prevalent in the area and already have some complete skeletons, so that's why they left them there like that.

You could also walk around outside and there were some bones sticking out there. It was really cool to see them just sitting in the rock, it makes you wonder what else is buried there. I read that there were also some dinosaur tracks to see but we didn't get that far. It started to rain. :(

The next day Carol and Brett went to Sacrament meeting with us and left to drive back to Twin. I didn't get any pics of them for some reason, but we loved having them here and showing them our house and all the dinosaurs.