For family home evening this week, we went to the Draper Temple open house. The kids were so excited that they would get to go INSIDE the temple and see what it’s like. We met Kyle in town and drove from there to the church where we were to park. First they showed a video about temples in general, and it talked about some of the history of the Draper, Utah area. Kyle ended up missing the first part of the video because as we were sitting there waiting for it to start, Tyra, Jeremy and Ethan all decided they needed to go potty. When the video was over we went out and got on a bus, to be taken up to the temple.
The kids got really excited to be on the bus. They have never been on a bus before. I sat next to Tyra with Dinah on my lap, and Kyle had Jeremy on his lap and sat next to Ethan. Tyra’s eyes got SO big as the bus started to move, and Dinah’s eyes got big too and she just looked so concerned like ‘what is going on?’ She didn’t fuss or anything but she seemed to get closer and closer to me as the ride went on.
The bus dropped us off in the temple’s parking lot and from there we had to walk through a long tent to get to the temple doors. Thankfully the tent was heated because it’s still cold here in Utah, even though it has been warmer, it’s still cold. The kids were all really excited about getting to go through this really long tent too. (Just so many new and exciting experiences today).
We got to the end of the tent, and entered the temple and it was just so awesome. The kids were just so excited to be there and see how pretty it was inside. They had questions about everything they saw. It was just so wonderful to be there in the temple as a family, teaching our kids about why we come and what we do there. 🙂 They got to see the font where we do baptisms for the dead, and the endowment rooms, and the celestial room, and the sealing rooms, where families are bound together for eternity. They got to see the mirrors on each side of the sealing room and see how when you look into them, you see yourself and your family going on forever and ever. Such a wonderful opportunity to take them and teach them about the temple. This was the first temple open house I had been to too. Kyle had been to a couple, but we were living in Utah when the Newport Beach Temple had it’s open house, and I wasn’t able to (even though I wanted to) make a trip to California to see it.
After we went through the temple we left through the front doors and went through another long tent to another chapel, where they had some cookies, and from there we had to load the bus again to get back to the church where we had parked our car. And to finish the evening off, we went to Ihop for dinner. 🙂