General Conference
We had a great weekend watching conference together. Loren and Tess came home and of course we did the usual: boys go to the priesthood session and girls go out to dinner and watch movie, Clark and Elliot sleep over at Grandma's house and everyone together at Grandma's for a sourdough pancake breakfast. It was very fun to watch conference together on their new big screen TV.
Mothers Day at Waterford
Every year I get to spend a day going to school with my kids. This is the first year I didn't have anyone is lower school so I didn't get to do any of the "fun" stuff like sitting in a little chair and doing math puzzles with my child. Just the regular boring school stuff that "big" kids do. Of course I still enjoyed it — mostly because I got to watch my kids interacting with their peers (something every mother is interested in doing!)
Melanie's Surprise Birthday Party
This year the family decided to give my sister Melanie a surprise birthday party. As it turned out, our brother Matt was here from Pittsburgh for one day on business and we were able to plan the party for that night making it an even bigger surprise! It was great fun — all the kids came along and the house was full of noisy children and laughing adults as we had birthday pie and sang an (especially made up for Melanie) birthday song.
Stake conference
Along with General Conference, we also had Stake Conference this month. We had a wonderful temple session at the Jordan River Temple with our stake members filling up the entire chapel. The temple president (President Backman, who is about to be released) spoke to us along with his wife. It was a very spiritual meeting to be together in the temple with so many friends in the gospel.
The big news of this particular stake conference is that I was released Sunday as the Stake Provident Living Specialist, a calling I have been serving in for over four years now. I was happy to be able to turn everything over to a new fresh competent sister in our stake who I know will do a wonderful job! The next big question is where will they have me serve next? Stay tuned....
Percussion Recital
Now that Clark is a middle schooler he is in the band as a percussionist. He has been taking lessons with Elliot for over a year now and is doing well on the marimba as well as with all the other instruments involved. Mr. Chamberland, their teacher, decided it was already time for a recital (the kids thought it was a little soon!) You can hear what a great job they both did: Elliot's Solo Clark's Solo
This year Halloween was a quieter event than usual. With Madeleine working, we only had 2 kids go out trick or treating and then come back and watch a movie with us. Thank goodness we had a big family or it would just be Alan and myself and how scary would that be?!
Illness
October unfortunately was filled with a lot of coughing. Somehow Alan contracted pneumonia and enjoyed four days in bed, two doctor visits, one set of chest x-rays, two rounds of antibiotics and an interminable amount of coughing! At various times, the rest of us experienced (thankfully less severe) coughs and colds all adding up to several bottles of cough medicine and literally hundreds of cough drops. Hopefully that was our turn....
We got a bunch of fun pictures from Phillip! He is doing well and seems to be quite happy in Azuqueca. He is still a district leader and a trainer and so keeps very busy. He wants everyone who is praying that they will find people to teach, to know that prayer works — they have found several investigators and even have a baptism or two in the works! As of November 14th he will have been out a whole year on his mission — he is half way!