Is it Spring????

I keep thinking it is spring, that I will go out and plant my flowers, but everytime I think it's almost that time...it starts snowing...so I guess for now I'll just dream about warm days and nights and what my yard will look like when it does get warm and the flowers start growing. I will post updates, because I have faith that the sun will shine and the wind will stop blowing and when it does you are all invited over for a lazy afternoon with coke and crushed ice!

Whitney

My beautiful, graceful and creative daughter Whitney never got a birthday blog. So here it is. In my mind, this picture describes who Whitney is. She has such a creative mind...she doesn't need to look at what she is doing, it is just there. She is naturally graceful and whenever she puts her hands on any project it just becomes what she wants it to be. She looks beautiful in ragged pants and a tee shirt and bare feet with her hair pulled back. Her soul is as lovely as her face. She has the kindest heart in the world. I am lucky to be her mother. To learn from her. She has made me a better person, and I love her very much. What a blessing when she came into my life 26 years ago and she continues to bless me today.

The Masters

Jim, Jamey, Taylor and Jack got in on Tuesday's practice round of the masters. Jim is taking the pictures here, but Jamey has 1200 pictures, so I'm sure if anyone is interested, he'll be willing to show them. The boys got golf balls from Tom Watson and watched the players skip balls on the sixteenth across the water. Taylor and Jack didn't know Grampa was coming so they were surprised at the airport when he met them at the gate! It was fun for all four of them!

Spring is on its way!!!!!!

Spring is on its way..with its promise of all things green. It is my favorite time of year. Those first warm days (where are they???? its snowing outside) that make you think of hot summer nights to come. There is hope in the air. I get excited at each sign that my yard is waking up. Small blulbs, planted years ago are struggling out of the hard ground. If it does snow, it melts quickly. Today I will plant pansies in a few of my pots on the front porch and maybe one or two renoculous, my favorites. They are a glorious precurser of what is to come. Later in the spring I will plant seeds in the ground by my trellis. They will be scarlett bean and morning glory vines. They start out just a small seed in the ground or a pot. You nurture them and care for them and then you wait. a week, or two? Maybe...then one day you wake up and go outside and see a little string of green and then the next day several more strings of green and then the next day several more strings. (I plant multiple seeds in the same place). They look a little pathetic at first....sometimes needing a bit of string to hold them up. The vines seem very frail at first. I must be careful with them or they will break. Each day as they grow I start twisting them around each other. Each singular vine from each seed is getting stronger and then as I twist them together they gain in strength. Somedays I go outside to see how my vines are doing and they seem to have grown a foot overnight! They get full and become bushier. After about six weeks I start noticing a flower starting to form within the leaves. This is when the excitement starts really setting in. I have enjoyed watching these plants grow from tiny seeds, the whole process. I could have bought an all ready done vine in May and had everything in the yard just so - but then I wouldn't get to experience the miracle of watching a seed start from the beginning and go through the stages - to struggle to grow and finally to bloom..... oh the beautiful blooms in all different colors, deep purple, bright fuscia, startling white, periwinkle blue. Different colors, but all climbing up the same post of my trellis. It is a miracle. I think of my concerns and worries for my family and what I've learned these past weeks. I must have faith. I'm at the stage where I'm still holding the package where the seeds lie waiting to be planted. I haven't even started planting yet and as I have just described it is a long process. But it always happens. I would never go a day without taking care of my plants. How greateful I am that I just have to look outside to be reminded that Heavenly Father will help me accomplish anything. It is His promise. I just have to plant the seed DO THE WORK, and have the faith. He will take care of the rest.

Happy Easter

What a nice weekend we had! On March 22 we celebrated Jamey's 35th birthday....even though he is in Philadelphia we had a chance to chat with him and Becky and the boys. Who'd of thought we would have a kid that old??? What a great family they have and what great things they are doing. It was fun to see Tom the day before his 57th and see the Bagley's line up to have Megan cut their hair. And then a beautiful Easter Sunday. We started out with Whitney and I giving a lesson in YW's. The two of us are in charge of doing a tree for the Festival of Trees next November. Our YW president is using the theme of "being prepared" and the parable of the 10 virgins for this year and that is the theme we will decorate the tree around. So for the lesson I told the story of the Ten Virgins...then Whitney described her vision of the tree...all old and Jeruselemy with lanterns catching the light and bright scarflike garlands going in and out of the branches. She talked about the sights she had seen in Turkey last summer with Jolyn & Company, and really made you see her vision of the tree and of course the girls all fell in love with her. It will be a neat experience for us. On to SS and then Church where of course our beautiful Choir sang. Only the Tab Choir can sing better than our Ward Choir! We had a nice Easter dinner with Abby, Mike and Jake, Nick, Whitney, Tyler and his friend Melanie, Jim and myself. Ham, funeral potatoes, asparagus, rolls, salad, Abby's delicious lemon bars and of course some Easter chocolate. It all tasted great! It was a wonderful day and I hope you all had as nice a day as we did!

More of What I am Learning

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us: It's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear
our presence automatically liberates others.

Nelson Mandela

Abby's 31 Today

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ABBY ROSE,

What a fun year we've enjoyed with Abby and Mike. It was about a year ago that they told us they were going to have a baby! It was so much fun to watch the excitement unfold to feel it in our home. Finding out they were having a boy to make sure we had a basketball team was just another fun moment along the way. Seeing them prepare their home, and getting ready for the big event... waiting through the summer months..... and then as Jim and I were watching Boston win the world series getting the call that we could come over and see Jake. I love to watch as Abby has become such a beautiful mother. She is one of those women that glows. Not long ago, she was describing to me how she felt about her little boy. She said " she thought she knew what it was like to love little children when she was around her nephews, but it was a whole different feeling when you got your own..." I think the word was indescribable. And of course all mothers know that strange and wonderful feeling we have for our own children. I am so grateful to be the mother of this great woman. To see her accomplishing so many things. She is a wonder at business, has a creative mind, she is a loving and unselfish friend and daughter, a perfect mom and wife.......and she has a great husband who gets up with Jake every other night and works from home one day a week to be with their little boy. Have a Happy 31st year. Love, your mom (ps finally learned to scan a picture and thought our blogging crowd might like to see your wedding picture, because I don't know if anyone has ever seen it!)

Butterfly

The butterfly is a fascinating creature. It is truly a work of art: beautiful colors and delicacy, flying high and wide on gossamer wings- free.
But the butterfly didn't begin its life in such a lofty state. In its earliest stages it was a caterpillar; crawly, slow, unattractive, plodding along inch by inch. I wonder if in its wildest dreams it ever imagined what its destiny could be.
Later in its development it spent time locked in a cocoon of it's own making - alone and perhaps even secure - warm and safe. There, through the simple yielding of its nature to a higher nature, it becomes one of God's most wondrous and glorious creatures.
Before transformation was complete, however, an intense and agonizing struggle had to be worked through. In order to become the magnificent creature it was destined to be, it first had a life and death struggle to work its way out of the cocoon - an exhaustive and seemingly impossible task for such a delicate creature. Could she endure?
On one occasion a well-meaning person watching this struggle decided to help the helpless butterfly, since it seemed such a gargantuan task for it to have to do on its own. So the person carefully sliced an opening in the cocoon with a razorblade and the butterfly was indeed able to get out much more quickly. The problem was that the butterfly was never able to fly. You see, the struggle is actually part of the butterfly's way of becoming a butterfly, and the strength it gains through the struggle gives it the strength needed for flying. By solving the butterfly's problem, the person had created a flightless butterfly.
The butterfly's develpment from a crawly, creeping, caterpillar to a glorious free-flying butterfly depends on the butterfly's acceptance and achievement of it's own struggle - on its faith that the struggle would lead it to something better.
If only we, as people, would accept our lives and the changes in it with the same faith as that of the lowly caterpillar, perhaps we too, would see that we can "fly". We are called to pray and trust in willingness to wait in patient expectation. Will not God who provides such a glorious end for the little caterpillar provide for us in a way that we cannot envision? Even in our wildest dreams?

My Neighbors

I live in a beautiful , normal, peculiar neighborhood. We are protected by a hugh mountain almost on top of our heads which is beautiful in whatever season we happen to be in......I was just interrupted from my writing by a neighbor who brought me soup, because I have been sick. The thing that makes this so incredible is that my friend that made the soup has cancer. But of course, here in our neighborhood a little thing like cancer doesn't stop you from making soup for your friend. To make the reader understand what this story is about, I have to go back a few years, like 30 years. A group of young people from different walks of life someway or another ended up in this corner of the valley, in a neighborhood on a hill below a beautiful mountain called Lone Peak. We were all pretty young, just getting started in our first homes....excited to put yards in and have families, which is exactly what we did. We worked on yards, furnished our homes and had lots of children. I don't know whether we were prepared or not for what lay ahead, maybe we grew into our preparedness together. As I see it we still don't know a whole lot, but we know more that we did back then....we continue to not get what's going on, but we continue to live through our lives, learning and growing from each other..................more to come

grandchildren

i am sitting here at abby's house watching a beautiful baby sleep. baby's are a miracle. they make you feel good when you don't. just hearing their excited voices over the phone after a fun vacation to disneyworld.( the pa despain gang) is all it takes to keep me going. i have been feeling kind of down this week,wondering if i am going to have a sinus infection the rest of my life, and also wondering if it will ever stop snowing...i know i shouldn't complain as i have come so far...so on to the babies where you get a sense of hope and peace. i know that someday my sinuses will dry up and the sun has to come out sometime...so as i watch jake stretch and start to wake up i can picture him this summer rolling down our hill in the backyard and watching taylor,jack,hogan and luke playing baseball. it's a lovely picture.