22 May 2022

Becky took this photo during Come Follow Me last Sunday. It was a golden hour spent together on a warm afternoon.

Lucky for us, Sofi messaged to let us know she was watching the lunar eclipse Sunday night. We hurried outside and saw the earth's shadow cover the moon. It felt neat to be looking at the same event hundreds of miles apart.

Gibson received an award for being on the Principal's List for his high GPA at Honors Night on Monday.

Helen got an award for Principal's List and a BIS LEADS award for demonstrating commitment, leadership, enthusiasm, academics, determination and success.

Here's a photo of the kids from our ward plus a few extras. From the left are Ben, Tayvon, Daniel, Mary, Annie, Hudson, Helen, Gibson and Scott.

We're happy for both of Helen and Gibson's hard work in school!

On Wednesday night we attended a dinner celebrating the DECA team. Mr. Rogan honored all of the students with a personalized and heartfelt speech. This is a photo of Helen receiving her certificate from competing in the ICDC competition.

After the awards, the team gathered for a huddle. It was neat to see their closeness and trust in each other. Mr. Rogan asked each person to pick a word to describe their feelings. Helen said, "Grateful."

Here is a photo of the 2021-2022 DECA team. From the left: Noah, Ryder, Colin, Aunika, Lucy, Mary, Malia, Rowan, Helen, Chloe, Tyler, Hannah, Lily, Tayvon and Mr. Rogan.

Helen had a fabulous DECA year, demonstrating a lot of growth as a competitor, traveling to new places and building new friendships. She's looking forward to another great year and will serve as the DECA president for 2022-2023.

For a very, very long time, Brandan has worked towards offering cooking and nutrition classes to his patients. Nothing like that exists where we live and dozens of his patients have expressed interest in learning how to make inexpensive, delicious and nutritious meals. Brandan had to create the model himself. Craterworks, our local maker space, opened in 2019. One of the last spaces in the building to be completed was a commercial kitchen that was available to rent. Finally Brandan had found a home for nutrition classes. Just as he was negotiating details of the class, covid came along and squashed his plans. For the past two years, he has been swamped with covid care. Restrictions on community gatherings were another barrier to starting cooking classes. After years of problem solving and persevering, the first cooking class met on Friday night. Brandan didn't want to make his patients feel self conscious by attending the class, but we stopped by for a few minutes to say hi and see how the class was going. And we came home with a stack of recipes we want to try ourselves!

Becky's birthday was Saturday and we celebrated by attending the temple together in the morning.

Then we went out for breakfast together.

The floor in the restaurant was tiled with pennies. We've never seen anything like it.

Helen created beautiful watercolors of three of our favorite national parks for Becky. We're excited to get these framed and hang them up in our house. 

It was the best kind of birthday, full of love and time together, and capped off with a bowl of ice cream.