BYU Art Museum

Several people in our ward have been telling us to make sure we go to the Carl Bloch display of paintings of Christ at BYU.  All I've heard are amazing reports about it.  Most of these people were older than us, so I was a bit worried about my teenagers thinking it was boring.  But, Sean was all for it so we reserved our tickets for it.  We were going to go last week for family night, but lo and behold, you can't reserve tickets for the same day you want to go, so we reserved them for tonight.  We were going to take another family with us and Travis was going to take a date, so we needed 11 tickets.  They are free, but you can only reserve them in blocks of 5 or less.  So, I got 2 blocks of 5 tickets and then was going to get 1 more for Travis' date, but I forgot to change the 5 to a 1 so ended up with 15 tickets.  We never got around to inviting the family we were going to invite and the girl Travis was going to ask out had to work, so we ended up with 10 extra tickets and 2 extra parking passes.  Sean announced it in Elder's quorum on Sunday and had no problem giving out the extras.

So, we spent some time in Provo/Orem, had dinner at Pizza Pie Cafe and then headed to the art museum.  The kids were out of school, so we thought it would be fun to make a whole day of it.

They had I-Pads you could rent that gave information, scriptures, snippets from general authorities, pictures of the cathedrals the paintings came from, hymns, etc.  We rented 3 of them and I have to say, if you go, definitely get there early enough to rent one.  It made it so much more real and spiritual than it would have been just walking around looking at the paintings.  The information available on the IPads was great.  Trevin and I shared one because he had his headphones with him, so he got one ear bud and I got the other.  Tyrel got his own and Travis had a headphone splitter with him, so he and Sean were able to share one with the splitter.  I let Trevin run ours, he was much better at it than I was.  We listened to everything on the IPad presentation and it took us about 1 1/2 hours to go through the whole thing.  I wouldn't recommend taking little kids because it takes quite a while, but I think 8 and up could handle it quite well, especially with the IPads.  If you have headphone splitters, make sure you take them and some extra headphones so you don't have to rent as many IPads.  I was impressed that the kids wanted to talk about their favorite parts on the way home.  They all loved it.