Out with a BANG!

Britton is now 11 years old.  His birthday was on Monday, and although we celebrated for 2 days straight we never did have a perfect birthday "picture moment". Oops.  The anticipation of opening gifts was killing Britton so he had all of his presents opened early Monday morning. (The fact we were all still in our jammies didn't motivate us to take any pictures)  The plan was to go to Tracy Aviary in SLC that afternoon, have dinner at IHOP, stay overnight in Salt Lake, go to Seven Peaks water park the next day and complete the celebration by going to the Real Salt Lake soccer game that night. (Thank you Pass of all Passes for making all of this free --except IHOP, of course.)  It's a good thing we were flexible because Adam wasn't able to leave work as early as he had hoped so we went to IHOP first, opened one more present in the car. . .

. . .got Britton's "Birthday cake" (a.k.a. krispy kreme donuts). . .

. . .and continued in route to Tracy Aviary which fortunately was opened until 8 a.m. on Monday night.  Britton LOVED Tracy Aviary and kept saying, "Why haven't we been here before? This is awesome! We really need to come back again." 

I love that Britton still finds stuff like this completely fascinating.  We don't need Lagoon, a good educational place will do. :-)

The next morning my plan was to run to Rio Tinto stadium real fast right when the box office opened at 10 am to get our free tickets (which were available only on the day of the designated "pass of all passes" game) and then we would go straight to Seven Peaks for the rest of the day. When Adam had a few more work things to do I decided to not take the kids with me and just come back for them. It was a good call. You see, a couple thousand of my fellow (cheap) RSL fans also turned out to "quickly" pick up their tickets, too.  I took these pics with my cell phone.

This was the line in front of me.

This was the line behind me.

Believe it or not I was only there for about 40 min. What a miracle.  I will never underestimate cheap Utahns again. It was the last of 4 RSL games where you could get free tickets with your passes.  As long as this line was there was another line just like it on the opposite side of the stadium at the other box office.  It should be no surprise it was a "sellout" crowd with over 20,000.

Real Salt Lake played a club team from Panama and won 2-0.  It was an exciting game.  I was a little worried about Jameson and the fact the game didn't start until 8 pm, but I made sure he had a long nap after Seven Peaks and before the game so he did great.  He was more interested in all of the people sitting around us than the game and made a lot of new friends.

That, my friends, is a summer that went out with a bang! We packed a lot in 2 days and Britton really enjoyed his birthday celebration.