Letter - Alpha and Omega, Goals

January 8, 2017

It has been a wonderful week.  Monday was Chad’s and my wedding anniversary.  I've been blessed to be married to him for 16 wonderful years! Over the last 16 years we've loved and served each other, laughed, worked, traveled a little bit, and built a family and a relationship that I wouldn't trade for all the riches in the world. I love how anytime we hear something funny from our kids or on TV our eyes automatically meet so we can laugh about it together. We continue to do our best to keep our relationship strong. He made me breakfast on Monday and I did laundry most of the day and cleaned the house to get ready for our trip.  We took the kids to dinner at YC’s Mongollian grill that night to celebrate our family birthday.  We thought they would all love it.  Both of the boys loved it but the girls didn’t like it, except the all you can eat frozen yogurt of course.  I guess next time we’ll have to stick to Chinese food.  That is something all of us love.   

Tuesday Chad and I woke up early at 4:30am to catch our 6:45am flight to San Francisco.  Neither of us had ever been to San Francisco before so we decided to take a two night trip to celebrate our anniversary.  It was a fun trip.  The city has a lot of fun culture and history.  It was fun to focus solely on being a couple and to explore the city without the responsibilities of cooking or cleaning or work or running errands or anything like that for a couple of days. It was also good to come back home and hug the kids and get back to my life of being a wife and a mother.  I love my job!  Thank you Brenda for watching the kids for us. 

If you’re interested, you can see pictures of our trip and read more about it here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10154773836927332.1073741858.792032331&type=1&l=0db9f7bbd0

I did not stick to my diet during the trip, I figured since this is probably my one and only chance to visit San Francisco I didn’t want to miss out on their local food.  I didn’t go crazy though and am back on the diet now.  I’ve already lost all the weight I gained plus some.  I have a little over 6 weeks left on the diet.  Next week I get to start adding healthy fats like avocados, nuts and heathy oils to my diet.  I am so excited about the avocados and peanut butter.  Those sound SO good to me.

We got home from our trip late Thursday night.  Our flight home was delayed by almost an hour, but other than that the flights were great and didn’t have anything scary happen in them.

Friday night Bryant and Chad had a deacon’s quorum camp out at Coons bluff.  The other kids and I stayed home.  I made taco salad and fresh salsa and we watched a movie together.

Yesterday we woke up and the kids got their chores done quickly so we could go play with Spencer’s aerobie frisbee at the park. 

Today has been a nice Sabbath Day.  We have late church now so we all (except Chad who had meetings) slept in until about 8:30.  Then I drove Bryant around with another Deacon in the ward to pick up fast offerings at 9:00.  In gospel doctrine I learned a few new things.  We talked about what scripture is.  The church’s definition which I knew is: “Words, both written and spoken, by holy men of God when moved upon by the Holy Ghost” (https://www.lds.org/scriptures/gs/scriptures?lang=eng&letter=s).  But we also learned that in the academic world in order for something to be considered scripture it has to be historic (past), metaphoric (can relate to present life) and prophetic (future).  I thought that was pretty cool.  We also discussed the meaning of the phrase Alpha and Omega which is a title of Christ.  We know it means beginning and end.  Christ created the world and with His second coming it will be the end of the world. But our relief society president said that they were discussing the meaning of that title in their home and her daughter pointed out that in a wolf pack the Alpha is the leader, the Omega is the servant and one who does all the work.  Christ is both our leader and our servant.  I thought that was very cool too.

I’ve set a few goals for this year.  Our family is going to talk about goals in our family council tomorrow night.  Each of us has the assignment to share at least one personal goal and a family goal.  My personal goals are:

·         To read the Ensign each month and read the Sunday school and Relief Society Lessons each week.

·         To attend the temple 52 times this year. (Once a week average.)

·         To learn the piano solo that my Mom gave me at a YW’s activity when I was young.  I’ve got to go find it! 

·         To polish up some of the old piano solos I’ve learned.

For our family goal I would like us to do a family service project at least once a quarter.  We were able to go serve at Feed my Starving Children two weeks ago and Tilly, Marlee and Karalee loved it.  We for sure want to go serve there again.  Tilly especially loved it since she got to be an active participant.  She loved not having to just watch.

My quote for today is from President Hinckley.  “We live in a society that feeds on criticism. … I urge you to see the big picture and cease worrying about the little blemishes. … These are only incidental to the magnitude of [Church leaders’] service and to the greatness of their contributions.”  I hope to criticize less and to praise more with everyone I meet, especially in my home.

Love,

Mindy