A Raucous, Rainy Weekend with Josh and the Pothiers

 

Visits to AZ are always exciting!

Josh has a new third grade class that we haven’t met yet at the American Leadership Academy  so we went to pay them a visit. Josh is a much-in-demand, teacher extraordinaire so it’s always fun to meet the kids and see him in action. We forgot to take a picture that day but Shawni had visited earlier and this is the picture she took of those terrific third graders and their stellar teacher:

Shawni and Dave left for China before we got a chance to see their beautiful new home so we decided it was time to get out there and see it, see them, get warm, play a little tennis and soak in some sun! 

Joke on us!  It never quit raining the entire time we were there. We finally got tired of waiting for the sun so the tennis fans of the family splashed out on to their good neighbor’s court with old rackets and balls and had a raucous time playing tennis!

 

We also had a grand time along with about a thousand other people (literally) at a pretty spectacular new place called Top Golf. You have to see it to believe it!

Josh joined us and we had so much fun!

On Sunday we loved being with the Pothier’s and their friends at church. It’s a dynamic ward with so many terrific people.  Shawni leads the singing in Junior Primary and had the kids beating the rhythm with chop sticks. Here they are holding up their scriptures:

When we got home the Pothiers had their weekly family meeting which was conducted by cute Lucy, who kept things moving along splendidly!

We loved hearing the kids and their parents express their feelings about what they had learned in church and their love for each other. And we had a chance to tell them how proud we were of the grand way they had embraced living in China. It was a meeting full of light and love!

After the meeting, Shawni got out that famous camera and took some memorable shots with us with the fam. It was a magic moment in time!

LOVE these awesome kids!

 

 

AND THESE INCRDIBLE KIDS TOO!

This Sunday just happened to be Super Bowl Sunday!  We didn’t realize that when we bought out tickets and our flight was due to leave just as the game started.  Luckily, that was one hour after the Pothers were to meet their neighbors who lived in their neighborhood in China. Grace and their daughter Rebecca had become best friends. They wanted to move to the US and thought that Arizona would be a good place to settle after the Pothers bragged about their good schools and great weather.

Shawni had prepared dinner for them and left goodies at the house that she had arranged for them to rent and the excitement was pretty high by the time we got to the airport to greet this cute family. The mom was from Hungary and the Dad was a US citizen but hadn’t lived here for 20 years. Rick and I were glad to be there to hold the sign so they could hug their dear friends when wild jubilation erupted as they emerged from the concourse!

 

Packing the car with kids, luggage and their new friends, Shawni dropped us off at our gate and then drove them to their new home. Because our plane was an hour late, we got to see the first half of the game on the TV at the gate. But we missed the breathtaking last 30 seconds and had to watch it on the news (it appeared quite a few times) when we got home.  

It was a weekend to remember!

Christmas Eve Morning in Hawaii

Since we had to leave Hawaii in the afternoon on Christmas Eve to be able to get home in time for Christmas morning with the Looslis’, we had a fun Christmas Eve morning with the Hawaiian Eyres. Everyone had a wonderful time. There is always magic in the air when it comes to giving and receiving gifts! Pictures are worth a thousand words!

This fun gift for Elsie brought delight to everyone (especially Po) who saw this little bird take a drink of water. I  remember having one of those when I was little. Or was it when our kids were little? Or was it at Grandma’s house? Anyway, it brought back fond memories and pure delight to the kids over and over again!

 

Ana was over the moon when she found this little caste iron frying pan for her dad at a garage sale. It was $2 but she talked them down to $1!  She could hardly wait for him to open it. Caste iron is one of his favorite things!

Forgot to take a picture of Ana’s delighted when she opened her Half-Chaps for her riding lessons, but I did take a picture of her Breyer horse collections which she proudly displays in her room and covers up when a small child or week-long visitors come into her room.This is just a portion of her horse collection. The rest is under her bed!  She is quite a horse fan don’t you think?

 

And before we left we saw a demonstration of Camden doing “The Plank”. He is the school champion for his age group and manages to hold this position for 8-15 minutes. Is he a strong guy or what? Only his toes and his elbows touch the floor (although he did tell me that he usually does this on a carpet).

The girls had a fun ride just before we left….

And of course, we made a last stop at the beach right next to the airport to watch Jonah kite surf, one of the hardest sports in the world. He is really getting good!  There are always at least 50 kites up on this beach because the wind never stops blowing there. It was so fun to watch!

Aja packed us a lovely bag of treats for our journey and armed with a Christmas present for the whole family, a new paddle for our paddle board at Bear Lake, generously gifted by Jonah, we headed for the airport in Seattle. We spent Christmas Eve on the plane and at a Comfort Inn for a four hour nap before we headed back to SLC at 5:15 a.m. to join the Loosli Family for Christmas morning.

A Christmas season we won’t soon forget! 

Children for Children Concert

At Christmastime, when our kids were little we got a little worried about the fact that they were thinking a whole lot about what they wanted to get for Christmas and not too much about what they wanted to give.

One year, a neighbor who was working with a humanitarian group to build a new elementary school in Bolivia mentioned their desperate need for funds and a new idea was born. Why not have the kids in the neighborhood put on a concert and charge the parents, neighbors and friends to watch them perform with all the proceeds going to help build this little cinderblock school in Bolivia. In those days the entire two-room school could be built for $2000.

We held a meeting with the kids and their parents and the kids were delighted to think that their talents could help build a school for kids their age in Bolivia! The kids practiced, showed up and performed and the parents (some who had more available funds than others) dug deep and with some matching funds we somehow managed to raise $2000 that night! The kids were over the moon!

And so a new tradition was born: The Children for Children Concert which has taken place every year in some form or other for the past 30 years. Now all these years later, our children have taken this good idea and made it even better as they have involved their own friends and neighbors where ever they live, from Arizona to Boston with good causes of their choice.

In Ogden Utah last night, our oldest daughter Saren, her husband Jared and their family organized their 7th Annual Children for Children Concert in a beautiful old church in their neighborhood which has been turned into a Community Center. They filled the church with eager participants and their parents.

Their oldest son Ashton conducted the festivities and oldest daughter Eliza (in the red on the right above) announced the numbers.

First, a short, heart-wrenching video accompanied by the beautiful music of Kurt Bestor, Prayer of the Children was shown to let the audience know that the money this year (as always for them) will go to orphanages in Bulgaria where Saren had worked and served as a missionary many years ago. A foundation called One Heart Bulgaria has now done wonders for the beautiful children in orphanages all over Bulgaria.  The light was low and the pictures are pretty grainy but you’ll get the message. They were taken by Saren when she was there, eight months pregnant with twins many years ago. 

This year half of the proceeds also go to the I Love Lucy Foundation which is working to create a registry for children with the rare Bardet Biedel Syndrome which our seven-year-old granddaughter Lucy (Shawni and Dave’s daughter) is struggling with.

Family after family came up with clever ways to entertain the audience. From delightful poems to songs and dances as well as lovelyl violin solos. Complete with the usual technical difficulties, the program had the audience was smiling about both the entertainment and the glitches. Everyone was thankful for their coats and scarves as the old radiators in that lovely old building brought the temperature up to almost 50 degrees, a welcome relief from the frigid 10 degrees and freezing smog outside.

The kids had a ball presenting their adorable “acts”! The light was so low that all the following pictures are blurry but it was the best my little iPhone could do under the circumstances!

At the end of the program, all the children leave their parents’ sides to participate in the largest Christmas Pageant Ever!  The shepherds and angels go through one door to bedecked, the wise men through the other. Then the narrator tells the simple Christmas story, revised from the Joy School lessons while the kids act it out! It’s quite a site!  This year Joseph was about two feet shorter than Mary which created a bit of ripple through the audience!  Mary is sitting in the picture below!

 

These handsome wise men brought their own costumes and treasure boxes for the spices:

And we had the best little three-week-old “Baby Jesus” ever!

Grand tradition and wonderful way to get kids excited about giving and making a difference at Christmas time.  Below is a picture of the money that Ashton posted on instagram that the good people in the audience left for the cause. The kids were over the moon! 

Delight of the Holidays with Children

There is nothing like the sweet soul of a child….especially during the holidays!

More than half of the forty two people who were here for Thanksgiving were children.  After making their “thankful lists” and stuffing themselves, most of those kids retired to the downstairs to watch Polar Express. But one very thankful little eight-year-old Oliver stayed behind. He had announced that he was going to make a list of the things he was thankful for about his grandparents on the road trip here and he wasn’t about to forget it, just for a movie! 

Sweet little Oliver sat down in the relative quiet and composed ten things that he was thankful for about his grandparents. Awww!  What a sweetheart!  Here is what he came up with…a treasure!

Precious thoughts from the mind of an adorable child!

Later that day we started dragging out the Christmas decorations with 10 year old Eliza. We found this pretty hilarious message to some unknown beloved person created by Charity when she was a child. As you will see, she inherited the “terrible speller” gene. If you can figure out what this says at the end, you’re a genius!  Translation at the end of this post.

Probably the most fun “kid” in the world is Santa Clause, who left this delightful picture for the kids one Christmas morning. Just look at the genius system of loading the sleigh, the cat overseeing the progress and the elf ready to drop yet another package on the conveyer belt! Better hurry or those reindeer are going to fly away! 

There’s nothing like the magic of the holidays!

Translation of Charity’s message:  ‘Tis the Season to be Jolly and have Joy. Merry Christmas Happy New Year, Love from your secret buddy, Charity Eyre

A Fun Project and Snow Canyon

Two years ago we got news that our little log cabin in the valley near New Harmony in Southern Utah had burned completely to the ground in a matter of minutes. The fire came up the gorge by the house, burned 50 beautiful cottonwood trees in its path and literally devoured our little cabin.

For one of the more spectacular pictures taken by our neighbors, see below:

As sad as that was, especially for our son Jonah and his wife Aja who had lived in that little cabin for a period of time while they were building in St. George and had stored all their most precious treasures there i.e. wedding albums, journals, baby books and the list goes on and on, a fun project has risen from the ashes.

Although the insurance never totally covers losses, we did have fun with building a new little barn with a two-room loft overhead. It was not really a replacement but a fun way to spend the insurance money!

So the new deal is this: a nice barn/garage with a loft overhead.

For more pictures of the work in progress inside click here.

I’ve had a good time decorating the inside the past few months. It was fun designing the kitchen cabinets and figuring out what would work, mostly from IKEA.  I decided to just go with fun colors on a background of gray. Our stellar contractor, Matt Lofthouse and his wife Julien, who actually live in New Harmony were terrific to work with! 

While we were down there for a week last week, we were stationed in St. George where we enjoyed the warm weather, the bike rides through spectacular scenery and a night at Tuachan, the wonderful outdoor theatre down there. It  was fun to Starlight Express, a show that was a favorite of all the kids when we lived in London. The roller skating wasn’t quite up to what what we had seen in London, but it was a fun show and brought back lots of memories! This is what we saw that night (the play was secondary):

 

It’s a beautiful world!