Want Some Ice Cream With Those Smart Pills?

"This is the funnest day of my life!"

Doodle could not stop saying that all day long yesterday!

I must admit, it was a really fun day!

We started our day with the Ogden Pioneer Day parade.

Pioneer Day is a Utah state holiday celebrating the day the Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley and I guess officially settled Utah.

The parade us fun, except the part when the boys went to the bathroom and plastered it with wet paper towels and got Mr bird so mad he almost cancelled the rest of the days' festivities.

The floats were fancy, the horses were prancy and the rodeo queens were sparkly.

After the parade we headed to Fort Buenaventura for some fun pioneer era games and live fiddle music.

We all got to watch a sheep get sheared with real shears with really sharp blades. As the guy was shearing the poor thing he paused to pull the wool back and let the kids feel the pillowy soft fleece. Just at that moment the sheep decided to poo! We all got a very close look at sheep manure. The kids were like, "EEEEWWWW, gross! It pooped!" The mountain man said that was not poo, but smart pills. He said, "Go ahead, try one!"

Some of the other kids did not get his joke.

"Are you sure?" Said one very trusting boy? "They look a whole lot like poo!"

"See, you're getting smarter already!"

After the sheep we made a corn husk doll like the one Laura Ingalls Wilder played with as a very little girl. Then we went and saw how they spun the wool into yarn. Doodle helped carve a wooden sign.

We saw candle dipping and lots of pioneer era guns. Beano though the guns were the best part. We saw one just like the one Pa Ingalls would have used to hunt.

After all the festivities we came home and crashed for a while. Then we made dinner for the kids and headed out for date night. Doodle got to join us (she's so lucky!).

We went to her favorite restaurant, Javier's.

After we ate we wanted to do something fun, but everything we tried to do was a bust. Being a state holiday, nearly the whole town was shut down.

So we winged it.

Over the last year or so Ogden city has been commissioning local artists to paint plastic horses to decorate the down town streets.

Most of them are right around historic 25th street.

So we parked our car at one end of 25th and started walking. We made our own tour of the painted horses.

We had so much fun. 25th street is lined with cute little shops and antique stores. Most of them were closed, but we had fun just looking through the windows.

Lucky for us we found a shop open that sells ice cream, we could not pass that up!

At the end of 25th street is Union Station, a huge train depot with a cool train museum inside.

The museum was closed, but we walked around the train yard and looked at the antique trains they have outside.

Then we walked down the other side of the street, looking at all the cool shops and painted horses on our way back to our car.

I loved, loved, loved having Doodle with us. I really treasure the time we get one on one with all the kids. It is so fun to see each individual personality and to just be with them. I love that girl more than any other girl on this planet.

We came home with sore feet and fun memories.

What a great Holiday!