October 21, 2015

Hi Scrumptious Darling son of mine from tip to toenail!  AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!   Last night Wesley said “shut up and fight me” and I nearly burst into tears!  MISS YOU! 

It sounds like and feels like you are doing so well, but you’re so positive, optimistic and grateful and enthusiastic and hilarious and adventurous and spiritual and dedicated and healthy trustworthy thrifty clean and reverent and star spangled all the time that I wonder if we would know if there was ever any trouble? 

We can take it! We want the good bad AND the ugly! Probs that is hard to find because you’re gorgeous, even bald, and Taiwan is breathtakingly gorgeous as well, so good luck with the ugly!  

I am not exactly sure how to support you the very very best, but I imagine looking in the mailbox and seeing something in there is kind of fun, so I will do my best to entertain with tasty little newsy tidbits from home, spiritual wonders, and anything else that may or not be helpful at all J. 

Seth was laying in the playroom this morning doing absolutely anything to not do home school and he said “I DON’T EVEN CARE ANYMORE! I JUST WANT A PET!  I DON’T EVEN CARE WHAT ANIMAL IT IS!”  That kid is SO FUNNY.  “That kid’s funny.” a few minutes before that “Mom, can you please tell Santa Claus I want a giant turtle?”  A few minutes later, “I just want a dog. I don’t care what I have to do to get it.”  So home school is going well J. 

This weekend is the 25^th anniversary of the Bluffdale Arts Musical Review, guess who starts the whole thing out?  Richard Simmons you say? Rick Astley with his list of things he will never do? Beiber Fever? All fine guesses, but wrong on all accounts.  COY COY COY!  He starts with…”Come on along and listen to…the lullabye of Broadway. The hip hooray and balley hoo,  the lullabye of Broadway….”  IT IS SO FUN!

I told you a little out Colby Sims being home and such, well Colby is also a merry man for the Scarlet Pimpernell.  They are so so funny,  and it is so so fun.  Welsey as well.  Coy is also in Madam Guillotine, Gaston, and he is the Music Man with all the pick a little talk a little ladies. His voice sounds so good! It is so so fun!

Annie is excited that she has a head mike and a speaking line in Hard Knock life. Seth is wondering if he can get something from the vending machine after he does his lost boys part.  It is going to be super awesome.

So things with Jared Morse are so tender.  Claire got up and bore testimony that he had prepared for a blessing, thought of what to say, then when he laid his hands on Jared’s head completely different words came out.  The Bishop and President Ghiz also blessed him, and he was told that he would live.  We all need to apply our faith towards that promised miracle. Thank you for praying for him.  I talked to Jenn Morse the other day and she said that she is feeling peaceful, and so are their children.  LIFE IS SO PRECIOUS!  When the bishop got up at testimony meeting he said that that is exactly what he had been feeling lately, how precious life is.

I don’t know if you have read Thornton Wider’s “Our Town”, but in the play a woman named Alice grows up in an ordinary little town. When she passes away she is given the chance to go back and live one day of her life again. All of her ancestors, who sit on their graves watching the town warn her not to go. She goes anyway, and chooses her twelfth birthday. The day begins and her Mom is just bustling about with the tiniest cares, trying to make a birthday cake and clean the house. This is what Alice says,

Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!...I can't. I can't go on.It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?

This is so precious to me. I am thinking so much about living and LOVING every second of life. The most ordinary of things are the most precious precious things.  Bottling tomatoes with Grandma Jan, watching Seth lay on the floor and roll around moaning for a giant turtle.  I want to realize life WHILE I LIVE IT! It is so glorious.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.T. S. Eliot

I really think this is the Uchtdorfian moment when we realize how glorious it all is, and the circumstances don’t change at all maybe, but we “come to ourselves”’ as the prodigal son and realize how very blessed we are to be ALIVE to live, and love and breathe and learn, and hug, and eat and dance and purple pansy polka (which has been reinstated as a ceremony of celebration at home)

Coy and I have been having a lot of conversations about his career. He can’t see himself sitting at a cubicle programming a computer all day every day for the rest of his life, but computer programming may be the best launching place to patent agent, patent attorney, free lance patenting of new computer software. It could be a multi-faceted, lucrative, and exciting career. He is kind of in a soul searching place right now.

Coy keeps talking about how blessed we are as a family. He has seen so much now and is so desirous to instill in the children the advantages that their position given by God has given them.  They nod their heads, I nod mine, but we don’t get it like he does.  One quote I heard is that the gospel is here to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted”.  He has experienced both ends of that in his own life and in so many others, and he wants to bequeath upon the family the wisdom gained from those sacred and precious experiences, but they sit on the couch with their ipads and grunt.  Life has a way of afflicting the comforted I guess, but missions are fantastic for atleast making us aware of how blessed we are.

The experience with Merang’s family was so sacred the other night. Here are these two awesome valiant returned missionaries smiling with, crying with, praying with this family whom they have come to love so very very much.  Sister Doo Abun said “I so thankful we are found by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”.  Sacred, sacred times.  It was so fun to see their beautiful family. They just look so happy.

I love my life so much.  Yesterday we went to NPS with Grandma Jan, Chaelea’s little girl Halee, Chloe (the baby we are tending now, Vilate’s younger sister Esther’s baby), Seth, Annie and I. I just love love love to be with Grandma. We recited poems on the way like “The Touch of the Master’s Hand”.  We loaded up on chicken, yogurt, green beans, chips, ice cream and fun.  Grandma gets so excited to get a great deal on anything.  I love how she buys something “for herself” and it’s two giant turkey breasts for “sundee dinner”.  We’ve been bottling together and that is precious. I love Grandma Jan so much!

Jeni just popped in. She is in her last semester of BYU.  Her internship is teaching phys ed classes at the mental hospital.  She teaches 10 classes a week.  Today she was trying to figure out what to do with the teenage boys unit.  She said one lady is manic, which means excessive, so whatever she was asked to do in aerobics she was going so far overboard it was insane. Jeni thought the lady might snap her legs trying to do the splits!

We’re still doing a lot of the same stuff….Spen’s playing the piano, someone tells him to play softer, seth is saying JOOOOOOSSSEEEEPPPPPHHHHHHHHH 12 million times a day, Annie loves babies, Joseph wants to not to but he does most of the time and I’m proud of him for that.

We are reading a family book called “Navigating Early”. It is a really interesting read about a boy who’s mom dies so he is suddenly sent to a military boarding school in Maine, and meets a boy there who lives in the janitor closet in the basement named Early Auden. He is brilliant but socially challenged because he is so brilliant.  Early is obsessed with the number of PI, and he is convinced that pi never ends. In the number pi he sees a story, the way the numbers appear, and flow, and go together. He has a story about the journey of pi who in his mind is a boy, and now they have run away to find pi who’s story is almost exactly mimicking Early’s older brother’s life who apparently died in the war. It is super interesting, well written, great characters.   I think I only do two things right, not give up and read to my kids at night. J.

It is fall here. It is scrumptious. The skies are brilliant blue, the clouds a brilliant white,  everything is bright and crisp and rich in color and harvest. I’m in heaven in October weather.  Do you have a distinct fall there?  The leaves are changing in the Fairview canyon, the quakies that beautiful yellow. We drove through the Fairview canyon completely over the top and down. That BEAUTIFUL  mountain has so much to offer on the other side. There are beautiful lakes and the mountains are just gorgeous.  We want to take the kayaks up to that new lake. Little Grand Canyon is only an hour from Fairview! Who knew~ ? Not me.  IT IS AWESOME!

Annie and Carli take their bunnies on a walk with leashes. It’s pretty funny.  Carli’s bunny won’t move so she kind of drags it along.:).

I think that Joseph is enjoying seminary. He mentions it sometimes. I am so grateful for seminary.  Old Testament this year.

Last night Jeremy Larsen came over and said “I’m in a pickle, I need a ride to scouts.” We couldn’t find everyone, they were at the bishop’s house watching a live session with the piano guys who just kind of talked about themselves the whole time, but I think that’s what was expected, right? Fun times.

Dad had a neat experience. He went to Dave and Cindy Castleton’s house,  Grandma and Grandpa Jello’s sister Cindy. Anyway, their son has MS and they talked for about a half an hour.  Dad I guess gave them a lot of hope about new medicine and everything. He said he wishes he was diagnosed earlier so that he could have the advantage of the preventative medicine’s earlier.  He told them that Ryan can still have a full life, have children, live, not miss out.  I love Heavenly Father.

Can I share with you a super super super cool quote by C.S. Lewis that I’ve probably already shared with you a hundred thousand times because I only have one brain cell?

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

So to love everyone, everything, every moment, and REALIZE it, every every minute!