The Grand Tour!

Wow! What a weekend it has been! Yesterday we took a tour with Zack's MBA program all around the Football stadium.  It was a very cool experience.  We had a man who led us and played the bag pipes the whole time until we got inside the actual stadium.  It was a blast. I will load the pictures and then at the end give you a little summary of the things we learned and how it all went.

The Bag Pipe guy!

This a lounge room for old players and their families to come during game weekends and just hang out and talk about the Glory Days.

A picture of the tunnel the team goes out onto the field from! (bad weather prohibited us from actually going onto the field)

Us with some of the lockers

If you watched Rudy, do these windows look familiar??

Living the dream... This is him just as he is about to hit it! can you see the excitement on his face even though its blurry? I can!

Walking out the tunnel!

The grass was seriously like a fairway on a golf course. The picture does not do it justice. It was sooo green!

You can see the bag pipe guy up at front. Lucky for him from Zack's Business building its just across the street to the stadium, I think he was getting a little tired of playing. It was freezing cold and raining, not hard, just sprinkling, but still, it was freezing.

The famous sign!

This is the tunnel the team goes out onto the field. I have another picture where you can actually see the field but Zack liked this one because he said it depicts the feeling he had perfectly because it looks like you are going to Heaven.

The view from the Press Box where we had lunch and listened to a really great speaker.

The famous locker room!

Zack in his "Heaven"!

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So, it was a wonderful tour. And after the tour we went up to the press box to have lunch and socialize and listen to a speaker.  Honestly when I was first looking at everything,  like the locker room and all of that, I was a little shocked.  I guess I expected some top of the line technology and beautiful huge lockers and really just like all around nicer stuff!  And, I mean, while everything is nice, and not bad at all, it honestly wasn't like some huge crazy ordeal like I expected.  What I realized, though, was that it isn't all the bells and whistles that makes ND special.  I mean, it is a BEAUTIFUL campus, and there are some very extraordinary buildings, and definitely some places that have all those bells and whistles, but that isn't what makes the whole experience special. It is the tradition that is there. It is all the history and all the amazing spectacular things that have happened there that makes this such a wonderful place. (and I think the fact that movies have been filmed there help out a little too)  This got me thinking a little bit about traditions and how special they are and how they really to make a difference.  Then we had a speaker at lunch who talked a little about traditions.  Did you know that until recently ND did not play recorded music at their football games?? Because of tradition! And did you also know that their football stadium doesn't have a video board? Because people say it is traditional at ND not to have one.  So then, I started thinking, well, how do you keep the sense of tradition but still progress forward and adapt to the new ways of life?  And I was drawing parallels to my married life. Zack and I both have traditions from our families that are very special to us, but how do we keep that sense of tradition but still make it into something that is special to "us" rather than just to Zack or just to me.  Then, the speaker said something along these lines.  I have to find out what these "traditions" are, and why they are traditions.  Once I get to the bottom of where this tradition started, I look at that and see if it is still something that is useful or meaningful to me or my community.  If it is, I keep the tradition.  If it turns out the tradition just really started because of a fluke thing, or we can't even figure out why this "tradition" exists, then I change it!

How wonderful it was to hear someone talk to us about that.  We need to look at what traditions are and how they work for us and if we can change them to make them more effective in our lives.  Recently, I have struggled with scripture study and trying to stay awake for them and pay attention at the same time.  If we try to read together in the mornings, we just never do, and we are too tired for it to get through our minds.  But if we read right before bed, which is what we have established as a "tradition", I feel like I am more focused on staying awake and getting through then actually studying and looking for a message.  So Zack and I have been talking about it and discussing what we can do to make this tradition more useful to us.  We came up with reading as soon as we clean up dinner.  We will eat, clean, read.  So far t has really  helped us pay better attention and look deeper into the scriptures.

Now that I have rambled on for quite a while, I will end this post. Til next time!