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.