2005/07/28

Uncle Matt

I received a wonderfully spontaneous phone call from my brother in Lebanon this morning. We talked for quite a while and caught up on things. The only problem (other than matt is so far away) was that Isabella wasn't very happy that she needed to be quite and could not have any mommy attention while I stood by the window to get good reception. Well, when we were done talking Isabella asked who I was talking to. I should say that we have only a few recent pictures of Matt and the family but I cut out the picture they sent in their family newsletter a few years ago and let her have it. She loves to point out the little girl (Stella) in the picture and then she babbles about how Matt and Mary Ann are her daddy and mommy. When I told her I was talking to uncle Matt she got pretty excited and started saying "unga ma" which is the best she can do for uncle Matt. After talking about him for a while she decided that she waned to show off her artistic talent by drawing him some pictures. Here they are Matt, with love from Isabella.



She has been practicing tracing hands. I "helped" her a bit with the one that looks like a hand. Then she traced mine.


This according to Isabella is an eye. She has been fascinated with eyes lately. I'm guessing that is the pink part and the orange and red are decoration. She wouldn't tell me and seemed hurt that I couldn't tell;)

2005/07/22

Oh The Power!

Well, I am officially released from nursery. For those of you who don't know, I asked to be released in April sometime and I just got out. The reason I finally did get released was because our branch president offered me the calling of Young Women's President. Yes, you read that correctly. He asked josh first and josh gave me the heads up. It is a good thing he did too because I would have said no if I had not had time to think about it.

I was really scared at first and I still am at times but at least I have some power now and can straighten out another program. After I gave into my fate and accepted that I would probably never get out of primary I decided to clean up the program and get it running the way it say to in the manual. I actually had a parent pick up their kid from class one Sunday and after I gave them the handouts from the lesson they said "you mean there is a manual for this class?". They were pretty much feeding the kids cookies all day. So much to some parents dismay I fixed the program. Now I have young women's to get back on track. Don't get me wrong, the members up here are nice enough. They just happened to live here all their lives and are very stuck in their ways. Their answer is to change church programs so they are more convenient or fun for them. When corrected they say "oh, we are only a branch we don't have to do it that way."

Even though we only have six baptized members on role and only three active I am hoping we can get things straightened out. I have some really good counselor and was pretty surprised that they were called so fast. It can take weeks or months sometimes.

My plan is that since Josh is in young men's and I am in young women's we can just take over and make our own little branch. I bet it would take the stake about a year to figure it out;)

2005/07/08

Josh did a pretty long post of the bear so I wont bore you by talking to much about it. We were pretty worried that the rain wouldn't stop but in the end it wasn't so bad. Just a little bit of rain in parts. We had a little trouble with the canopy since a little over a mile was gravel road it was pretty dumpy and the joints holding the plastic popped out a few times but we were able to fix it pretty quick. Isa did really well until we got to the last 100-200 yards of the race when she got really scared because the winds were so strong. The wind was really disorienting and I was glad to be in the hot tub later. It got really cold so I was very chilled. Katie was great and drove up to the finish line and sat there for two hours waiting for us so she could take our picture and so we wouldn't have to ride the shuttle bus down to our cars. We got really cool shirts too. Here are some pictures.

Here we all are back at the cabin after the race.



Here we are showing off the cool bear on the back of the shirt.