Quick update

Just a quick update. I'm way behind on everything. Joe and Janette had their little baby girl on April 28th. They have named her Lillian Charlotte Dabel, but they call her Lilly for short. We met her when we visited them the 5th through the 7th of June. We were able to attend her blessing. She is a doll. I was amazed at how good-natured she is. All the older children jostle her around and she just sleeps through it. I didn't do much but hold her while we were there. (Gained three pounds sitting on my you-know-what.) Joe is still looking for work. Our prayers are with him.

Hallie is engaged to David Sphar. We are very impressed with him. He is a returned missionary, has his own organic lawn-care business, and has recently hired on as a butcher at the Winegar's in Clearfield. He and Clay may have something in common after he gets trained. David and Hallie have been looking at houses with acreage in the Clearfield area. David would like to have space to do his mulching and composting in their yard. They are scheduled to get married on September 4th, in the Salt Lake Temple.

I have been busy getting flowers put together for their wedding, and then I managed to agree to make the bride's maid's dresses. I am also in the process of making Hallie's veil, and altering her wedding dress to fit her. I was feeling only slightly overwhelmed when I found out our good friend and neighbor, Van Macdonald is getting married on July 11th. Van and his late wife, Marilyn, have been such good friends of ours and have helped serve at our children's weddings, that I naturally offered to serve at his wedding dinner! So I arranged it with the rest of our group of friends and have been on the run getting centerpieces ready for their dinner, arranging for the set-up, take-down, and getting all the ducks in order for that.

We have a new Relief Society Presidency in our Ward. Our new neighbor, Karen Smith is the new president. She took two of the three best pianists in the ward for her second counselor and secretary. Now she's looking for a Relief Society pianist. Guess who gets to fill in until she gets someone? :) Yep--I volunteered.

More than a year ago, Mindy gave several of us, (Parents and Grandparents) a cute little notebook that she scrapbooked, and asked us to write our life history in them. She had a list of questions to answer. I started writing, and didn't even bother to look at the questions. I filled her little book within a few weeks, and found it was so much fun, I decided to go even further and entered it all in the computer. Then I continued to write more about my life. I'm really a fairly boring person, but it was sure fun to write an entire volume about my childhood up until the time I was ready to deliver Steven.

Jon Farrell had taken a book binding class at the "Y" and when I mentioned how badly I wanted to learn how to bind my book, he volunteered to teach me. He and Heather came to our house on a Saturday and Dave and I learned how to bind books. Since that time, I have finished a second volume about my childbearing years--what it was like to become a mother, etc. Dave and I have bound these volumes and have given a copy to each of our children for the past two Christmases.

I'm sure our children are expecting volume three this coming Christmas, but it won't be happening. When I write about my life, I relive the experiences as I write about them. The next phase of my life wasn't a very pleasant one, and I don't really want to revisit that time again. I also don't think my children want to hear about my feelings when I was going through my divorce. So I jumped ahead to what Dave refers to as volume four--the period of time beginning right after we got married. This book, however, is fictionalized and has been a composite of our experiences combined with some of the situations we have been involved with outside of our own family. I ended up changing the names to protect the guilty (and the innocent). It has been a fun adventure and my goal was to have it finished before July 1st and ready for publication. I reached my goal and it's all finished.

It was drawn to my attention a few month ago, that Dave's mom hadn't written anything in her little book that Mindy gave her two years ago. She even cut back from two days a week at the temple to one so she could work on her life history. After four months of taking Thursdays off, she still hadn't gotten started. So I volunteered to call her every Thursday morning at 9:00 am and visit with her for one hour each week so we could get the information from her and then I will transpose it into book form for her posterity. So far, we have had only two weekly visits. Right after our first week, she left to go to Joanne's for Josh's graduation, and then she went to Annette's for a week. We had our second visit right after she got home, and then she had something come up so she couldn't visit the next Thursday. Yesterday was supposed to be our third visit, and I forgot! It hit me when I went to bed last night that it was Thursday, and I had missed our call. I called Mom this morning and apologized. We are going to do a make-up session on Monday morning, and then resume our Thursday mornings again.

Volunteering is fun. I get to do lots of things I would never get to do otherwise. The only problem is that sometimes I get too many things going at a time, and I can't keep track of all of them. Perhaps I will need to do what our children do--they set an alarm on their cell phone to remind them of things---actually, that's a very good idea for the Thurdsay morning visits.

Well, bye for now, I'm going to go set an alarm on my cell phone.