Birthday fun!!!

For my birthday Seth and Marisa took us on a fun adventure to the Phoenix Gold mine!! It was so much fun to get up in the mountains and to see how gold mining works and do a little panning ourselves.

It was sooo cool because I actually on this trip learned alot about gold mining but mostly about the gospel. I love it when that happens. In the gold mine there is a vain where all of the precious ores are at and it is like a line that goes all the way through the mountain. and the miners try to follow that vain as far as they can. But they cant take everything out because in the mine they need to leave columns or pillars to hold up the mountain. So here are these columns with this vain going right down the middle of it with thousands of dollars of gold and minerals in it and as the guide said "you cant get to greedy or the mountain will fall in on you" I learned that we need those pillars in our lives too. Like reading the scriptures, saying prayers, going to church, serving.....etc. Or our mountain will crumble too. Even though we may be tempted by the gold or riches of the world "tv, Internet, music, possessions....etc" we need to keep those pillars in our lives and not take them away because our time is being spent on things of the world. It is amazing what you can learn at a gold mine.

We also got to go panning for gold and that was so much fun to watch Marisa find all kinds of rocks or as the guide said mountain :) She made rock castles and got super wet and dirty. That means it was a great day!!!

I thought I would share what I learned from panning for gold as well. When you pan for gold you pick up a whole ton of dirt from the water and you sift it around with the water from the stream. You then take out all of the big rocks and do it again. You keep on doing this over and over until you get down to the black sand then if you are lucky you will find a little tiny nugget of gold. I was so much fun to do this process but what I learned was like the refiners fire. It takes alot of trials and perfecting for the lord to help us find the real jewels inside of us. It was an awesome day!!!

this is the vain

Marisa found something!!! She said its gold mommy for you happy birthday!! That is enough to make you smile all over!! :)

After our adventures we were pretty hungry so we went to a pretty fun Mexican restaurant!!

This is the cake that Seth and Marisa made for me and as you can see Marisa wanted to put on a few rocks from our adventures for the decorations!!

It was a wonderful day!!!