Blizzard!

What you can’t tell from these pictures is that on this Memorial Day, May 30, we woke up to a true blizzard!  The wind is howling and the snow is swirling and it sounds like a snow storm in the Yukon on January 15th.

 

There are even ice cycles hanging from the lounge chair!

 

As much as we will miss not walking among the graves of our loved ones in the cemeteries today which we haven’t missed for many years, we’re so glad we’re not there. Bear Lake and Logan can only be worse!  Ah for a little sunshine!

New Beginnings

Our last high school graduation was many years ago so it was fun to be back at a high school graduation that was more like my own rural town graduation than our kids’ graduation from East High School.  On Friday cute grand-nephew Adam Mann, graduated from North Summit High School.

It was great to see this family together again! One of our niece Trina’s darling daughters lives too far away to be there but her other four great kids were a sight to behold!

We were excited to see that Maxine’s cute baby is named Ashton, just like our terrific grandson who was named after where his father was born.

 

I don’t know how we missed getting Bobbi’s wife in this picture but their adorable little three year old has the cutest dimples you would ever want to see!

 

 

Beautiful Mom, Trina and her husband Mike and son Eddie were there to celebrate. This mom has been through a lot in her life and always comes out smiling! 

 

 

Also beaming was Trina’s amazing sister Mandi and her husband Bret and their kids. Adam lived with them for a while since they live just a few houses from the high school while Trina and Mike were living in Texas.

 

With graduations as plentiful as the rain/snow this time of year, as soon as we start to feel sort of melancholy about the end of a once-in-a lifetime experience, we also realize that it’s really just the brand new beginning of the next great adventure!

One More Fun Retreat for Mothers at Our Home

On May 20th and 21st another one hundred deliberate mothers gathered at our home to “sharpen their saws”.  What fun we had thinking, planning and being inspired to be better at the world’s most important career… Motherhood!  The event was planned and organized by our sensational Saren Loosli and her terrific co-founder April Perry through the incredible outreach of the Internet and their website at PowerofMoms.com. 

 

On Friday about fifty mothers gathered for the afternoon to be instructed by the “guru of organization” and co-founder April.  She did a session called Mind Organization for Moms which was soaked in like sunshine after a long, cold and dark winter. She is amazing in her abilities to teach Mothers to organize their papers, they computer files and their homes in order to survive the inevitable.

 

On Saturday all 100 mothers fit pretty nicely into the great room where Saren and April directed a program filled with great ideas…many of which came from the astute mothers in the audience.

 

Saren allowed Dad/Richard and I to be part of the training on creating family systems and she did an amazing job of keeping her parents on task and of organizing and making things run smoothly as well as presenting great ideas herself. She’s quite a woman as many of you know (no prejudice intended)! 

 

Among the Saturday morning presenters was wonderful DeAnne Flynn, well-known author and speaker on Motherhood…..

As well as the delightful and inspiring Utah Young Mother of the Year, Emi Dalton Edgley. Find Emi in the upper right of the collage below which is a compilation of our wonderful day together!

 

 

An outstanding presentation was also given by one of the Power of Moms anchors, amazing Allyson Reynolds (below right).  Each presented a stimulating and moving message for these mothers seeking career training!  That cute girl to the left, our baby Charity was the outstanding event coordinator as well as talking about the sometimes wacky parenting ideas she grew up with. It’s so fun to see these book-end daughters working together.

 

                                      

During the lunch breaks the moms divided into eight groups and talked about their major mothering concerns in two different sessions:

 

At one point in the training a wild cowboy alias “Tex” came galloping up on his horse and his giant ten gallon hat. The audience watched as he dismounted, tied the horse to the stone planter in the front of the house and ran into the great room to teach the group about the importance of serendipity in their lives. It was a fun surprise and an indelible image.  Thanks to Emi who saved my flowers in the planter from being an afternoon snack for Duffy the horse until I got there to rescue the flowers! I was so surprised that I forgot the camera. Shucks!

Saren and April calculated from registration forms that the 100 mothers there represented 493 children. Babes in arms (and car seats) won’t remember being there that day but very possibly what their mothers learned will be with them as they grow up for a very long time.

Warm congratulations to Saren and April!  After spending about 30 hours a week for the past two years, this idea whose time has come is really taking off! Ah the Power of Moms!

The New and the Old

This week Christian James Spencer was born by C section and was lifted out into the world at a spanking 8 lb. 4 oz. He is absolutely adorable! How those Spencers manage to get those adorable little noses is beyond me.

Oops, sorry little guy. I didn't mean to use a flash!





It was a bit of a scary delivery with temporarily losing his heartbeat and then having to put him on oxygen for a while and then Lindsay feeling as though this might be the end for a fleeting moment. BUT everything turned out great and here he is!









Something else new is that one of the finest families in our ward, the McDonald family with six kids, are moving to a new location. We are so sad to lose them but just think of the lucky neighbors who get them next! My amazing visiting teaching companion Heidi Shipp and I along with her darling son Matthew were there on Monday to help them move.





Another new beginning is happening to Sara McConkie, a dear friend of Charity's from study abroad in Jerusalem and adventures in India who is getting married this weekend. An extraordinary bachelorette party was held at our house. It was a pretty awesome sendoff for one amazing young woman!






Note

Note the 5th snow storm this week on May 19th!


You might think that 80 sounds old, but we attended a birthday party last night at the JSMB for one of the most amazing women who has ever walked the earth....and I mean she has walked almost every corner of the earth! The interesting thing was that she just didn't seem old...at all!
Just to give you a little insight to her fame both within the church and worldwide, six apostles of our church came to the party and if you asked how many ambassadors of the countries of the world she has been well acquainted with the answer would be in the hundreds! What a privilege it was to have known her when we lived in D.C


Here is Beverly Campbell in the flesh! (I'm so glad about that name tag!)





Even for Beverly this is a new beginning. As Elder Ballard said in his tribute to her, "Welcome to the eighties!"

Fun Weekend

Shawni and I had so much fun for a day and a half in Oklahoma City this weekend where we spoke together at Time Out for Women. On Friday night there were delightful talks by Virginia Pearce, and Emily Watts and  we were electrified with the music of darling Macy Robison who has a spectacular voice and an accompanist to match…the multi-talented Whitney Johnson.  Together they touched the hearts of everyone in the audience as Macy sang and talked about her multitude of life-experiences. 
Luckily she brought her adorable new baby so Shawni got her “baby fix” although I’m not too sure the baby was too excited about it!


 

Macy was purely an inspiration and we are looking for ways to get her involved in some Power of Moms retreats.




Shawni was immediately recognized by a cute self-proclaimed 71 toes "blog stocker" and many other young moms who have been following her blog.


 

Hilary Weeks is absolutely a genius at capturing the hearts of women at all stages of life. In addition to clever ways to say things, she can sing the right words and play her incredible original compositions on the piano at the same time. How can that be? 

 

We also had the pleasure of hearing Michael Wilcox who has recently lost his wife and is always such an inspiration!


We have done almost every TOFW with the amazing woman below. This is Mariama Kallon who faced unspeakable terror at the hands of the rebels in Sierra Leone during the war. After seeing her parents killed and her sisters legs chopped off, she somehow escaped and found the Mormon religion which she says was her salvation.  She ended up as a missionary on Temple Square in Salt Lake City and has become a beacon of faith and hope for thousands.  Her contagious giggle mixed with her gripping stories of belief and strength propels us into a world of wonder whenever we hear her.






This was our first “Time Out” this year and they don’t do them in the summer. We look forward to honing our talk a little and being in Richmond, VA in September, Logan, UT in October and Phoenix, AZ in November. 

We regretted missing Wendy Ulrich and Mary Ellen Edmunds but I had told the event organizers that I had to be home in time to give a SS lesson at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning and Shawni needed to be home too so we dashed off to the airport early.

When we got there I realized that our flight was arriving in SL in time to get to our darling Eliza’s Dance Concert at Kingsbury Hall which I was feeling so sad to miss.

 
I arrived just as the curtain went up and was treated to a most elegant Virginia Tanner dance recital. Eliza was certainly the star amongst about 200 little children who each had their moment of fame with their own little dance troop. I was SO happy to be there…along with Grandfather and the Loosli clan.







Very honestly….Charity would have been as proud as Saren!  This girl has the moves!!! 

One Heart Bulgaria

On Saturday I had the opportunity to be one of the speakers at a lovely Mother's Day Charity Brunch at Noah's in Linton.  What a privilege it was to be be in the same room with people who have done so much for so many! 

About 18 years ago these two valiant women Deborah Dushku Gardner and our good daughter Saren, served together as missionary companions in Bulgaria.

 

After spending time in the orphanages once a week for 18 months cuddling orphans and being horrified with the conditions under which they were living they decided that something must be done for help these beautiful children. Glyn Barker (below), a missionary at about the same time was heart-broken at the conditions she found in the orphanages and started sending supplies to twin boys in one of the orphanages after returning home. 

 

From there she and Deborah realized in order to get the help they needed to rescue these children they would need to organize a foundation. Glyn, Deborah, Saren and others have been back many time to assess needs and figure out how to raise more funds. On one trip both Saren and Deborah were pregnant (Saren 7 months pregnant with twins) and they were delighted to see what had been done with the help of the foundation (broken windows that had allowed snow to fall on sleeping children and been replaced and crumbling plaster on walls had been repaired) but were still aghast at how much there was yet to be done. 

To make a long story short this has evolved into a fabulous foundation called One Heart Bulgaria that now serves 27 orphanages and about 2500 orphan children in Bulgaria.  Many other people with a love for these orphans began to get involved. Several interns are sent over every summer to work in the orphanages.

The highlight of the program on Saturday for me was hearing from an amazing young man named Yenko who had been adopted at age seven by the amazing woman below from one of those orphanages.  What an inspiration it was to hear him speak at age 20 about what his parents have done for him. Watching the love between this mother and very special child was a bona fide tear jerker!

More help is needed to help these gorgeous children. To see how you can get involved go to http://oneheart-bg.org/
These adorable children range from happy and healthy to being in great physical need. For a terrific 3 minute video of Deborah which includes footage of the orphanage on You Tube click here. 

A special thanks goes to Quinn Curtis who organized a wonderful morning complete with a delicious brunch and an electric atmosphere of the importance of motherhood for those of us who were present.  To see more about Quinn and her dedication to mothers go to quinn@revolutionmotherhood.com.

Former Whiney, Worried Child Becomes National Young Mother of the Year!

Shawni was such a whiney child!  She was always whining about a brother who was mean to her or what we were having for dinner. In addition she worried about everything…her homework, her grades but most of all she worried almost every week that she had some new kind of cancer. 

Little did we know that little whiner/worrier who was  representing Arizona at the National American Mother’s Convention in Salt Lake City last weekend would be named the National Young Mother of the Year. Of course in hindsight, since all Shawni has dreamed of since the time she was two was being a mother….I should have known!

The convention just happened to fall on the same weekend as the big Fathers  and Future Fathers of Eyrealm gathering for diving in Cozumel and which had been planned and pre-paid before we even knew about the convention. Shawni and I absolutely insisted that Rick/Dad and Dave (Shawni’s husband) go and we would take pictures! 

It was great to have Dave’s mom and dad there since Dave couldn’t be. Once a mother, always a mother…as you see a mother on each side of the mother!

 

We were so glad that Dave’s dad was there to walk Shawni to her seat (she actually even wore heels) with the other young mothers at the banquet when they announced the new National Young Mother:

She found such lovely friends through this experience and it was fun for me to be with a dear friend, Elaine  whose darling daughter Emi was the Young Mother from Utah.

 

 

The Arizona Mother of the Year (right) and the officers of the Arizona organization were delighted!

 

 

 

We were so glad that Saren was able to figure out how to get there when a free ticket to the dinner popped up!

 

 

This is an lovely multi-faith organization which I have been involved with for many many years. In fact, if you can believe it, I was the Young Mother from Utah exactly 30 years ago!  Wow that made me feel pretty……old!

 

 

The convention went from Thursday to Saturday and was beautifully organized with outstanding speakers and events.  We met women from all across America who believe in the power of Motherhood and aren’t afraid to express their faith in God. It was a really inspiring experience!

 

 

On Saturday night they named the Mother of the Year. This year a wonderful woman from the District of Columbia won. With experience that ranged from losing a son to violence to being an outstanding teacher and mentor for young women who are in a half-way house as they come out of prison to unwed mothers, this woman has a lot of fantastic experience being a mother to multitudes!

After the dinner honoring the Mother of the Year, we finally dragged Shawni out of crowd who all wanted to talk to her to do a 30 minute TV show with the Mother of the Year for KBYU…make-up lady and all!  That was fun to watch and they both did a terrific job!

 

 

 

The next morning we had the great pleasure of sitting up close and personal at the live Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square performance.  They announced the Mother and Young Mother to the packed audience and then we were treated to the most incredible concert. I cried most of the way through.  I was just overwhelmed thinking of the blessings in my life!

At the end the choir, orchestra, conductor, organist and announcer all sang to US…”God be with you ‘til we meet again.”  It was a truly spiritual experience! Ah, what a weekend! 

“What a gal!” as Rick would say.  I am truly blessed to be this gal’s mother! Definitely no longer a whiner but she can still worry along with the best of us!