If it weren’t for great-great-great grandma Cora…

Yesterday, as a continuation of our weeklong SLC adventure with the Harris family, we had dinner at a sweet Italian restaurant, which Bell Captain Joe recommended for pizza (and he should know, ’cause he’s from Bwah-ston). There I got to snap a few portraits of my family (and even had a couple of myself taken, I know…. ME ON MY OWN BLOG, can you believe it?!). Love that beautiful window light…

We like to poke fun at my mom all the time because she’s about as Nervous Nancy as it gets. My dad likes to tease her for always anticipating the Worst Case Scenario. To this day, she’ll gasp and grab onto everyone if she thinks a car three miles away might be going too fast and won’t stop as we’re crossing the street EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE A STOP LIGHT. It’s pretty funny. So here in Salt Lake, which is a very pedestrian-friendly city, there are these buckets of orange flags you can grab at certain intersections to walk across the street with to be more visible to oncoming traffic. So my mom got to play safety patrol, pretty much her dream job. :) Just teasing, Mom. We love you for it.

Thankfully, Mom got us safely over to Temple Square, where we went to poke around the Family Search Center to see if we could piece together any of our genealogy. See, the Mormons LOVE genealogy… One of their favorite little phrases is “Families are Forever” (and oh yes, there was most definitely a cross-stitching of this in the library). They believe that you can be baptized or married on behalf of someone in your family who has already died. This is also why temple marriages and baptisms are so sacred and private… They believe that you are being joined not only to your earthly family, but also to the entire family of God. Also, the family you have on earth is also the family you will have in eternity. This is part of the reason why many Mormon families have oodles of kids and grandkids, and why some super-fundamentalists still adhere to polygamy… quite literally, the more family members you have, the happier you will be not only in this life but for all eternity. Needless to say, there’s a lot of pressure within the community to marry young and start having children immediately. I can’t imagine what it must be like for couples who struggle with infertility… the guilt, the feelings of failure, etc. etc.

So anyway, with Salt Lake being one of the genealogy capitals of the world, we thought it might be fun to see if we could find anything, just for the heck of it. We didn’t really have a whole lot of luck, because we didn’t have much information to begin with, but we did go back as far as Jamie’s great-great-grandmother Cora, who may have been from Czechoslovakia or Austria, depending on which census you look at. It was really cool to see the actual copies of the censuses, knowing that whoever took the census was actually there with our family at that time.

Jamie is further convinced that Cora MUST be short for Coraline, so if this comes up as a possible name for one of our children one day, don’t look at me!

And then we milled about in front of the temple some more…

Meanwhile, at doggie daycare, Gretchen got into a fight with Nicky and Tyson. Gretchen’s behavioral report says something to the effect of that Gretchen bumped into Nicky, who growled at her, and Gretchen took the bait and they started fighting, and then Tyson jumped in for who knows what reason, but in the end Gretchen had Nicky pinned to the ground by his neck and they had to put her in timeout. Naughty, naughty girl. But of course Jamie thought it was kind of awesome, and asked the girls if Gretchen held her own well enough.

I think she did.