Letter - Birthdays and New Beginnings

Sunday, March 30, 2014

2:20pm

I’m writing this as we head out to go visit Joseph’s graveside.  His birthday was on Wednesday and so this is the time every year where we visit him.  I love our new 10:00 church time.  We now have time to do these types of activities before family dinners and firesides and stuff like that. 

I love the spring flowers that have been blooming around our neighborhood the last few weeks.  This is a picture of our neighbors cactus that has beautiful blooms every spring.  The flowers only last a day or two.  This is the most blooms I've ever seen on it.  Its lovely.

A neighbor's apple tree just starting to pop.

This week of Joseph’s birthday has been emotional for me.  I’ve been busy which resulted in me getting stressed out and so my emotions have been intensified.  However, I’m feeling better now that things have settled down a bit. 

On Monday I threw a joint birthday dinner party for Chad’s Dad Art and Joseph.  Joseph was born on Art’s birthday.  This is the first year we’ve ever done something for Joseph’s birthday other than visiting his grave.  I enjoyed it.  Hopefully we can do it again.  A few of Chad’s siblings were able to attend the party, Jennie and Trever’s family, Shannon and Aaron’s family, and Devin and Suzannah’s family.  It was sure nice to have them join us in honoring Art and Joseph.  I made a BIG pan of Skouson enchiladas and some green tomatillo salsa.  The evening was very nice.  I made a special book of Joseph’s pictures for Art.  You can access the link to view it HERE on my blog.

When I go for a walk with the girls Tilly likes to have a turn to walk too so when we are close to home I let her get out and get some exercise too.

Tuesday was another busy day for me.  We had our ward Young Women’s new beginnings program.  We decorated for it in the morning and then I made some mini fruit pizza’s for refreshments in the afternoon.  Our program went well.  The Young Women ran most of the program and all I really did during the actual program is accompany the special musical number and lead the music.  I ended up leading the music at the last minute because I forgot to give the young woman we planned to conduct the music the assignment and she didn’t know how to do it without prior notice.  I made sure to apologize and admit my mistake in front of the whole group though since her name was on the program and everything. 

Bryant had a book report due on Wednesday.  His teacher sent out a text on Monday reminding that it was due this week.  Bryant hadn't even picked out a book.  It was an oral book report with a visual aid on a non-fiction subject.  I got after him a bit for procrastinating and forgetting about his assignment and then made a special trip to the library to find him a short book.  I found one about Walt Disney.  He worked on his visual aid on Tuesday afternoon.  He drew mickey mouse from an online tutorial  and practiced his presentation for me.  He ended up getting a 95%.  He would have gotten 100% but he forgot to have me sign his report paper.  Stinker, I was kind of hoping for a good life lesson to teach him not to procrastinate, but he pulled off a good grade anyway.

Wednesday was Joseph’s birthday.  During Grammy days I went up to our rental house to meet a garage door repairman so I could let him in to fix our garage door opener.  While I waited I walked around the neighborhood to get some exercise in and then since it was close I decided to go to the Mesa cemetery to visit Joseph for his birthday.  Well when I got back to the rental house the garage door repairmen called and told me they had trouble with their truck and were going to be very late, since I needed to go pick up my girls I just hid a key for the repairman to get in and then paid them over the phone.  We ended up having the buy a new opener and when Chad went to pick up the hidden key he said the new opener works well and they did a good job.

Chad's sister Jennie made us this special cake for Joseph.  Thanks Jennie!!

Thursday was Marlee’s birthday.  I didn’t have anything scheduled that day so I was able to spend all my attention on helping her to have a wonderful day!!  It was so nice.  For breakfast she ate the M&M’s she got from Grandma Flake.  For lunch she wanted to go out to eat at McDonalds so Tilly and I had a fun lunch date with her.  She had preschool in the afternoon and our way to school she saw the park and said, “Can we play at the park today?”  I said sure!!  Marlee took a bag of powdered sugar donuts to share with her class.  She likes donuts better than cake so that is what she chose for her treats.  After school we invited her friend Jade to play at the park with us.  For dinner that evening we went to chick-fil-a, her other favorite restaurant, then we came home to have her blow out candles on her donuts.  It was a beautiful, relaxing day for me and I think Marlee had lots of fun too.  I like our tradition of eating out on birthdays.  Marlee sure is a sweet girl and as she was playing with her new dolly she said, “Thanks for giving me the dolly mom.  I love it.”  I appreciated her gratitude.  Chad had a football game Thrusday night.  He left after Marlee blew out her candles.  I didn’t watch his game, but he told me that he caught an interception in the other team’s end zone and ran it the full length of the flag football field (80 yards) for a touchdown.  I would have loved to see that.  He said he felt like he was going to die after that run because he didn’t just run up the field he had to juke and run around players the whole time.  He got so tired, he's starting to worry about the time when he'll get too old to do those kinds of things, but I'll still love him when he's too old to do those amazing things.

Friday some of the young women’s leaders in our ward and I met at our new building to put all our young women’s stuff in the cupboards in our new building.  We went from 3 cupboards down to 2 cupboards so we had to decide what stuff we wanted to get rid of.  Friday evening Chad and I went to dinner and a movie.  Dinner was good.  We ate at Chipotle.  The movie was terrible.  We saw the movie Noah.  I feel kind of like Matt Walsh where he stated in his review of the movie on his blog that I should convince two people NOT to watch the movie in order to cancel out the $20 we spent on the movie.  Basically in this movie they portrayed Noah in such a way that he wanted to kill off the whole human race and save the world for the animals that were the only innocent beings left.  The antagonist in the movie who was a wicked blood thirsty man said that man had dominion over the animals, so they portrayed that as a bad thing.  It was terrible.  It made good evil.  Don’t go see it, that way my $20 will be canceled out. 

Yesterday was another busy day.  I donated blood in the morning.  I made up a song while I was there.  It is to the tune of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman” from the movie Frozen.  Here’s the song:

Do you wanna be a hero,

Do you wanna save a life,

Come on down and donate blood,

Don’t be a dud,

You can save a life!

You can save a life.

Of course I did all this in my head.  That would have been awkward if I started singing it out loud.  That song was running through my head all day yesterday and now all day today.  After donating blood I hurried home to get ready for the baptism of Aaron Bodemann who is one of my new young women.  It was a beautiful baptism.  I was notified at the last minute that I was on the program to be welcome her into young women’s.  Luckily I had thought that might be the case and I am used to giving those types of remarks from when I was the primary president so it wasn’t a big ordeal for me.  After the baptism I went to watch Spencer’s football scrimmage.  Chad said Spencer caught a pass and had a good run off the pass while I was gone and it took 6 boys to tackle him.  Good job Spencer!  He was noticeably less nervous yesterday than he was in his game last week.  After the scrimmage Chad took Bryant to his game and the other kids and I went home so Tilly and I could have a nap.  I had a headache.  Not sure if it was from lack of sleep the night before or from donating blood or both.  Either way the nap was heavenly.  I should nap more often like my mom always did while I was growing up.  Yesterday evening instead of going to the stake center I stayed home to watch the first general Women’s Conference of the church.  It was so nice to watch it with all three of my daughters playing quietly around me.  They enjoyed all the singing.  It was a beautiful meeting that brought tears to my eyes on several occasions.  I love that now all the women will meet together every 6 months.

Today I taught the Laurel’s class lesson.  It was titled, “How Can Repentance Help Me Every Day?”  It went well.  We divided Elder Neil L. Andersen’s talk “‘Repent … That I May Heal You’” into sections and then all underlined the parts in our sections that stood out to us and discussed them.  I sure love our young women.  They are amazing.  Tonight we have a Bishop’s Youth Discussion fireside in our backyard at 7:00pm.  That’s one of the reasons why I did so much yard work last week.  We’re going to have a real fire at our fireside!!  The bishop is going to bring his propane fire pit instead of using our fire pit that requires wood so it won’t be so smoky. 

Tilly's tongue has healed well since last week.

My quotes for today are the scriptures I used to close my lesson today.  I read them last week in my personal scripture study and I felt it went really with our repentance lesson.  “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalms 46:1). God is very present in our lives when we decide to repent and turn back to Him. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalms 51:10).  Our hearts will be made clean when we repent and our spirits will be at peace.

Love,

Mindy