Tess now spends everyday with 24 6-year-olds! She is teaching first grade at Canyon View Elementary in SLC. The first couple of weeks, she has been teaching her students how to spend all day at school — kind of tough for little kids used to playing everyday all summer! Now she gets to teach them to read — and reading will change their world!
It’s hard to believe that we have been married 29 years! We celebrated with dinner and a date at the Salt Lake Temple which is where we were married lo those many years ago.
So now we have the token 4 generations photo…Wally with his son Alan, with his son Loren, with his son Kenyon. Cool huh?
Today we celebrated all our August birthdays: Grandma Pat, Anne, her mother Carol, and Toby. And we also marked the day with Elliot being ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood. What an awesome group of men we have in our family!
Monday, July 30th, our grandson Kenyon was born at 1:56 pm at the Provo Utah Valley Regional Medical Center where his dad, Loren, was born 27 years ago. He weighed 7 lbs. 8 oz. and measured 20″ long. Both Kenyon and Anne are doing well and we are all excited and grateful that he is so healthy and beautiful. We are looking forward to holding, rocking, feeding and playing with him . . . we just wish they lived a bit closer!
Eleven years ago we took all 6 kids to see Diane in Boston, our friends the Collettes in New Hampshire, Niagara Falls in Canada and the church sites and pageant in Palmyra in New York. Since Clark and Elliot were so young and don’t really remember the trip, we wanted to take them back as teenagers and this was the summer!
Our friends the Collettes have daughters Miranda and Jennica that are the same ages as our boys. They have been to our house often, so it was fun to spend time with them in their “neck of the woods” (literally!)
We arrived at Niagara Falls in the late afternoon, took the Maid of the Mist boat tour and then were there as it got dark and they turned the lights on the falls. The falls are just so amazing!
The next day we visited the Church sites in Palmyra and then saw the Hill Cumorah Pageant that night. This year the pageant is celebrating its 75th anniversary.
Alan’s sister Diane lives in Ithaca, New York, working at Cornell University. They have a saying there that “Ithaca is gorges” and so it is. Diane took us to see two beautiful gorges. It was great to see where she lives (with her dog, Happy) and where she works at the University. Brown family sleepover!
On our way back to New Hampshire we stopped to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum. He produced over 4,000 works of art – over 300 covers for The Saturday Evening Post magazine. We especially liked seeing his barn turned studio.
We finished the trip with a few more days in New Hampshire, including a day at the beach and a day in Boston checking out John Adams’s houses, Paul Revere’s house and The Old North Church. Can you have too much fun on a vacation? I think we did!
As part of getting ready to move to Oregon to attend graduate school at Oregon State this fall, Phillip decided it was finally time to buy his own car. His good-looking Kia Forte has now joined our car family! How many of you have FHE lessons on car maintenance?
Thursday June 7th Elliot graduated from High School. And since he has been attending Waterford School since Kindergarten, he actually graduated from 13 years at Waterford. He is definitely feeling like it is time to move on, and yet at the same time, it is all he has known and he will miss the campus, his teachers and his friends that he has known for so long. Now he has summer with the family and then he’s off to BYU for bigger and greater adventures!
Tess joined Loren and Phillip on their birthday and we had one big party for them all…well okay, it was just dinner on the deck with the grandparents, but hey, with 3 birthdayees, there were plenty of gifts being handed around!
Loren & Phillip turned 27, Tess is 24 and I am feeling old 🙁
We are so glad the kids are willing to traipse around 5 or 6 cemeteries every year. We enjoy cleaning up the graves, placing flowers and remembering our great heritage. This year Alan is busy trying to get GPS locations for as many grave sites as he can. What an awesome help for those doing family history work. Along with our own family history work, our family has decided to take the Church up on their request for help with indexing the 1940 US Census – it is a great activity for FHE or Sunday afternoons. Try it, you’ll like it!
On May 16, Elliot and Clark played in a percussion recital at Waterford School. The highlight of the program was Stubernic, by Mark Ford. Elliot and Clark were joined by their fellow marimbist Erica Park.