Brigham City Temple Open House

Warning: this is kind of a long story, so feel free to skip down to the pictures.
I won't be offended.

As soon as I heard that the Brigham City Temple Open House was going on, I went online to try to reserve spots for our family to go.  There were several problems trying to find a date, beginning with the fact that Brigham City is two hours north of us.  The dates of the open house began while Ben was still working during his internship.  The week he had off, between his internship and his semester starting, was when Cat would begin school.  Then we were moving over the weekend.  Then Ben was starting school the next week.  I saw that Cat's school wouldn't start until Tuesday of the week Ben had off, so decided we should go on Monday.  I reserved a Monday morning spot for us and some friends.

Great.

Except I found out at back to school night, four days before school was supposed to start, that Cat's new school wasn't starting the same day as the rest of her school district.  I guess because it's a charter school, it makes its own rules?  School would actually start for Cat on Monday.  Cue panic.

By this time there were limited time slots available, combined with the fact that we now had a kid in school, with Daddy's school beginning soon, and we would be trying to orchestrate a trip to see something two hours away.  Sheesh.  I asked around to see if anyone had a reservation we could trade with.  No luck.  I called the office to see if we could get a later time, but that didn't work either.  I considered having Cat miss the first day of school, but with it being a new school, and Cat being a bit nervous, I felt like she needed to be there to begin figuring out where everything was and what the routines would be.  She preferred to be at school that day, anyway.

To complicate things, my grandparents were flying in to the airport in Salt Lake, and we had offered to pick them up, since we'd planned on spending our day in Brigham City and Salt Lake.  Should have been easy.  Well, after much deliberation we decided we would just chance it and show up at the temple in the afternoon without a reservation.

I felt like it was important for Cat to be at school through lunch so she would be comfortable with that much of the day.  We checked her out of school as soon as lunch was finished and drove straight up to Brigham City.  We had our printed reservation, which was for that morning, and were prepared to explain the problem to whoever would be checking the reservations, but nobody checked.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe they were too busy?  But it didn't bother us.  We were in.

LDS Temples are built for many reasons, but it seems like what my kids understand better than anything else is that Ben and I were married in a temple.  So they associate it with weddings.  Therefore, Jack asked me in every single room, "Is this where you get married?"  I'm not kidding.  He even asked me in the baptistry and in the entry areas.  He was really excited when we finally walked through a Sealing Room, where couples are married, or sealed, for eternity.

Of course, the temple was absolutely gorgeous.  There was an incredible amount of detail work, which reminded me of the beautiful details in the Nauvoo temple.  Below are a few interior pictures I found.

Interior Shots- 

I didn't take these pictures.  You can see them (and more) online here.

Baptistry

Celestial Room

Peach Blossom Window

Sealing Room (where couples may be married, or sealed, for eternity)

We had just enough time to watch the introductory video and walk through the temple before we needed to head back down to Salt Lake to pick up my grandparents.  We were a bit rushed, but were still able to have a good experience.  We had to hurry to the car once we finished walking through the temple, but I made sure to take a quick family (minus me) picture before we left.  Literally - I took two pictures of Ben and the kids and one of just the temple, then I took a couple more pictures of the temple from the car, as we drove away.  We made it to the airport in plenty of time, thank goodness, and were able to enjoy dinner with Oma and Opa before dropping them off at my aunt's house (my aunt being out of the country, which made it difficult for her to pick them up).

I'm really glad we were able to make it work, though the day ended up being much more hectic than we would have liked.  We loved being able to walk through this beautiful House of the Lord and help our children understand its significance.