Temple Groundbreaking

On Saturday, August 17, our church "broke the ground" for the new Hartford Temple! When we found out we'd be moving here, we knew a temple had been announced to be built here, but sometimes things can take years. Lucky for us they started right after we moved! While it will be a long drive to either Boston or NYC to visit the temples there in the meantime, we are excited for all the excitement that comes with a new temple being built. Hopefully this can lead to discussions about our faith and missionary opportunities with our neighbors and friends. The plan is to have the temple built in 2 years so the open house will be fall 2015. I'm excited to bring 5 year old Jackson and 3 year old Abbie inside to tour the temple before it's dedicated! Both kids love the temple and Jackson gets so excited when he sees this picture hanging in our home or in the foyer of our ward building.

It's going to be so beautiful and they've tried to pattern it to look like the several other new england style churches of the area. We watched them demolish several old buildings that used to stand on the lot. Then they removed the debris and they smoothed out much of the dirt. We drove by several times and I would always point out to Jackson that there is going to be a new temple there! He was so excited and even started building a lego temple.

So when the day finally arrived for the official ground-breaking we were really excited. But since it was a small area with not a lot of parking, they only invited bishops, stake presidencies and a few tickets to members of the wards of the temple area. So sadly we weren't invited to the actual event, but were able to watch it broadcasted live at our church building.

Tyler was determined to go to the actual site though. It was so close to our house and according to him the worst thing that could happen is we'd get turned away and then drive to our building to watch it. He especially wanted to go because we thought President Monson might come. His granddaughter is in our ward and he has visited her often, so people figured he'd come to this one himself. I asked her on Sunday and she really didn't know because his schedule is always up in the air, but he was hoping to come. So we planned on showing up to the site to be seat fillers :) But it turned out we had other things to deal with that day... 

The week leading up to the ground-breaking Tyler was out of town. This was the first long trip he'd been on since we moved here. He had to go to San Fran on Sunday night and got back late Friday afternoon. The kids had been really good all week but starting on Friday Abbie got a cough and I was starting to think it was croup. She had a low fever and a raspy voice and while she had never had croup before, Jackson had it twice as a baby and I knew what it sounded like. Later on Friday night I was pretty sure that was what it was. I was glad Tyler got home just in time to help me! We were still planning to go to the groundbreaking at this point.

She slept ok during the night but then woke up around 6 am just couging and miserable so since it was a Saturday I had Tyler take her to urgent care to get checked out and get her on the magic steroid medicine. We had to wait til it opened at 8 though... So I showered and got ready for the event while Tyler took her there. At this point our plans of showing up at the actual site were gone and we'd just go to the church. But while at the urgent care the doctors there were concerned that Abbie maybe had another problem with her lungs. She was also drooling a lot which I figured was teething but could have also meant something else was going on. They sent him to the hospital with her to get a chest x-ray. So now we decided I would take Jackson to the church for the broadcast and he and Abbie would go the hospital together. I probably should have been really nervous but I still felt pretty sure it was just croup, mother's intuition I guess... Meanwhile Jackson and I had a great time at the broadcast and he sat still with me the entire hour and a half. It was a great meeting and I felt so blessed to be living here at this time!

He brought his shovel to help dig!

from www.lds.org - President Monson addressing the crowd

from www.lds.org - all the stake presidents of the temple district digging with the prophet

You're allowed to take pictures in the chapel on Saturdays ;)

Turns out President Monson was there and turned out Abbie just had croup. They gave her a high strength steroid at the hospital and that helped her completely stop coughing within hours. The illness never affected her behavior, she had been acting fine the whole day, well except when they made her get the chest x-ray I guess. Glad I missed that one, I had enough drama with getting Jackson's blood drawn and poked for IVs this year.

These 2 did a lot of waiting in the hospital

Tyler and Abbie got home a little after Jackson and I did and at that point both Daddy and baby were pretty tired so they took naps together upstairs. Jackson really wanted to help dig to build the real temple so we headed down to the site and found the plot of dirt still there.

His first dig

Standing where the prophet stood

We are so lucky to have a temple being built within our ward boundaries! It will be less than 15 minutes away and about the same distance it was from us in Orlando. It will be such a neat experience to watch it be built, we are so excited.