From Colombia to Canada

So we left our new friends like this great guy named Kevin who is teaching in Dubai and beautiful scenes like the ones below:

 

 

And traveled from Cartegena to Miami to Houston to Calgary. After 10 hours on planes and lots time at airports, we were greeted by our wonderful hosts for a seminar that we were doing for our church in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada which was about 90 minutes beyond Calgary.

It was a LONG day. We started at 5 a.m. in Cartgena and arrived at our hotel in Red Deer just before midnight.

Our host families were so kind and about 800 people showed up on a Sunday night at a hotel ballroom for a Seminar on “Saving Kids from The Entitlement Trap”. Many were members of our church and many were not. It was a jolly group and we loved being with them. What a congregation of terrific parents doing their best to be better! Rick/Dad snapped this picture just before we started. A little blurry and only about half of the packed room but did we have fun!  How they got all those people there is beyond me. About half were from surrounding areas and half from the this small city.

 

We have to say that many young mothers came because they had been following our daughters’ blogs (powerofmoms.com, 71toes.blogspot.com, bostonshumways.blogspot.com and drippingwithpassion.blogspot.com). We are so happy to be turning the battle cry of the importance of mothering and families over to our kids!

One of the keynote speakers at the Educators Convention in Cartegena was Pam Allyn who was terrific. Serendipitously, after a few minutes of getting to know each other we discovered that we have the same editor for her latest book at Penguin in NY. Small world!  Pam has started a project to promote worldwide literacy called LitWorld.

Even though her two daughters are grown and out of the house, she told us that one of her favorite things to do is to read Mormon Mommy Blogs. She had her favorites that she tuned into regularly (and she now has a few more)! It’s an amazing phenomenon but reading those mommy blogs is growing in favor with many women who are not members of our church but are enjoying having a peek inside the real lives of deliberate Mormon Mothers! 

The weather was spectacular and couldn’t have been more different than the place we had just left! 

And on our way to the airport we stopped to see the beautiful Calgary Temple which is in the process of having an Open House for tens of thousands of curious visitors who are taken on a tour of the temple before it will be dedicated to the service of the Lord later this month. It is gorgeous:

I don’t know whether you can see it our not but the stained glass windows capture the beauty of wheat stocks which are the trademark of Alberta. In fact as we drove home in the dead of the night on Saturday we could see the headlights of many, many combines harvesting the wheat in the fields in the dark before the wet morning dew made it difficult to gather.

As much fun as we’ve had, we are really ready to go home. We are in the air on the last leg of our flight which was delayed. We should arrive home by about 1:30 a.m. Home sweet home!