31 March 2024

 

Happy Easter! We're basking in the sunshine today and thinking of the first Easter morning and a future resurrection morning.

This week was spring break for Gibson and Becky. Brandan stayed home to work while we flew to Salt Lake City. We checked out all the changes on Temple Square. The area is transformed. It seems like it will be another few years before the temple restoration is completed.

Here's a view of the pit around the temple.

Gibson came to Utah to spend his spring break with Helen and Abe. We had a few hours to wait before Helen got out of class on Monday so we toured the Utah Museum of Natural History. The dinosaur bones were our favorites.

This is an impressive display of ceratopsid skulls.

Gibson spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning in Salt Lake with Helen, experiencing college life. Gib celebrated his 17th birthday on Tuesday and Helen and friends made him brownies. Gibson is rock solid, dependable, loyal, crazy smart, athletic without trying and perceptive.

While Gibson was having adventures in Utah, Becky drove to Idaho to spend time with her parents. During her visit, she scanned about 150 photos, uploaded the photos to Family Search and labeled them. Most of the photos  she had never seen before, like this darling photo of Harold and Milo Larsen. Harold (the grumpy boy) is Becky's grandfather. This photo is from about 1918.

Back in Utah, Gibson rode the train from Salt Lake to Provo and met up with Abe for the second half of the week. This is a photo of Abe and Gibson tying a quilt for refugees at a service project.

Abe and Cece took Gibson to breakfast on Friday morning for bottomless French toast.

On Friday morning, Becky started out on a fun day with the ultimate goal of collecting Gibson and flying home to Oregon. She made a few stops along the way. First up was meeting Helen for lunch. Helen recommended a fantastic sushi restaurant.

We shared a photo of lunch and Sofi shared this photo back. She was literally across the street at a work meeting. Sofi flew from Washington to Utah on Wednesday for work. Sadly, she was in a meeting and couldn't join us for lunch.

Next stop was Provo to pick up Gibson.

While we were in the parking lot, Elder Jensen drove by. He served in Oregon the same time that Abe was in South Korea and was assigned to our ward for months. While, he goes by his first name now, we will always remember him as Elder Jensen.

We went to dinner with Cece and enjoyed meeting her.

Gibson and Becky then drove back to Salt Lake and met up with Sofi. Dan and Linda returned from their mission to England earlier in the day and we stopped by for a quick visit. We didn't take any photos, but they looked fantastic after a 24+ hour day of travel. Finally we said goodbye to Sofi and headed to the airport for our 11 pm flight home.

We got up early the next morning for an Easter sunrise hike to kick off our Easter weekend. 

We had a beautiful view of the valley from Upper Tablerock. Our sunrise hike was in memory of Jesus' faithful friends. "And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulcher at the rising of the sun" (Mark 16:2.) No matter how long and dark the night is, we have hope in Jesus Christ that morning will come, and just as those women experienced, the morning will be glorious and joyful.

24 March 2024

 

We love all the missionaries who dedicate two years to serving the Lord and serving His children, but occasionally we have the privilege of meeting extraordinary missionaries who elevate all they meet. This week we said goodbye to Elder Stephens and Elder Tafuga, Our friends hosted a farewell party to send them off, Elder Stephens to his original assignment in Mexico and Elder Tafuga to his home at the end of his mission.

17 March 2024

Happy 29th Anniversary to us! This photo is from March 18, 1995. We hardly look old enough to get married.

 

This photo was taken March 16, 2024. Sofi and Nate gave us tickets to a play at the Oregon Cabaret Theater for a Christmas gift. Life gets sweeter every year.

Sofi and Nate came to visit and we got to attend the play with them and Gibson. The play was a comedy based on the board game Clue and was great fun to watch.

 Nate spent Wednesday through Friday shadowing physicians at Brandan's clinic. Sofi was able to work remotely.  On Saturday they helped hang pheromone strips at the pear orchard. The strips prevent coddling moths from laying eggs on the trees which leads to caterpillars in the pears.

Meanwhile, Abe went skydiving. Spring break at BYU lasts for one day and Abe and his friends made the most of it. They spent the weekend in St. George, Utah and drove to Mesquite, Nevada to skydive. Abe completed a tandem jump from 13,000 feet. This is a photo of Abe with Aaron and Jake before their jump.

Sofi pointed out that since her and Nate's wedding rings have moss agate stones, they are going to be wearing green for all the St. Patrick's Days.

Helen shared a photo from her hike up Angel's Landing in Zion's National Park during her spring break.

Helen found this throwback photo from 2017. This is the same crack in the rocks with Abe, Helen and Gibson inside.

10 March 2024

We celebrated with Ed and his family on Tuesday night when Ed opened his mission call. He is called to serve in the Chile Puerto Mont mission and will begin his mission in July. From the left are Cason, Jason, Ed, Gibson, Chase, Crew and Grace.

 

Gibson made chicken and pasta soup with homemade rolls for dinner on Wednesday night, an impressive dinner for a 16 year old to make.

Gibson finished his internship at Oregon Architecture this week. This is a photo of Gibson with the model he built during his internship.

Helen spent her spring break with friends camping in Zion National Park, Utah and Sedona, Arizona. This is a photo of her friends on top of Angel's Landing. From the left are Brig, Paige, Helen, Hannah, Kiley, Kristen and TJ.

Abe and Cece went to the Draper temple this week.

This is a photo of Abe, Cece, Katrina and Camden.

Abe and Cece ran a 5K on Saturday.

The event was called Cougs v. Cancer and raised money for cancer research.

3 March 2024

Abe and Cece.

Abe and friends on the Jumbotron at a BYU basketball game.

Abe and Cece in front of the Provo City Center temple.

They went to the temple with a group of friends.

Another basketball game.

Looking good!

In class this week, Becky asked students to create a generalized formula based on a pattern of expanding staircases. Students built staircases with 1, 3, 6 and 10 tiles. Their next step was to predict how many tiles would be in the tenth staircase in the series. One table combined all of their tiles and made a bunch of paper tiles so they could build the 10th version (it has 55 tiles). It's unusual to see students having this much fun in a high school math class, but it's something Becky is hoping to encourage more often.

We opened our leap year time capsule on February 29 and laughed at our 2020 selves a bit. None of us wrote anything about covid, which would dominate the rest of 2020 and 2021. As predicted, Sofi is married and Becky is still wearing clogs. Thankfully, Abe has not dropped out of college to pump gas. Whew! We'll seal up a new version of notes to our future selves and look forward to opening it in 2028.

It snowed on Saturday and Sunday, leaving a beautiful blanket of white that quickly melted on the valley floor. We can still see snow in the surrounding hills and mountains.

The Youth Symphony canceled their performance on Saturday night because of the snow. We went to the Sunday afternoon performance and enjoyed a beautiful program that included Mendelssohn, Beethoven and an original piece composed specifically for the Youth Symphony.