Our tree at night

I love to look at sections of our tree.  It looks so artsy.

December Visits

If you look very carefully, you will see a tiny little face

peeking through the crack of a bedroom door

'way after bedtime.

Yep, there he is!

He's not the only one who stayed up too late.

Did you ever get so tired that everything was funny?

Well, there you go.

We did make some pretty tasty cinnamon rolls

before we got too tired though.

Sharing some cute pictures of us

This picture is a little fuzzy, but I thought Pakamer

looked so funny in it.Is she really this fat?  Maybe so. 

She was busy cleaning her tummy.

Here we are outside our little cabin

in the California mountains.  We had to take it

from this angle so we could put the camera

on a fence.  No tripod available.

This is Morro Bay.  The Morro Bay Rock comes up right

out of the water.  Nature can do some interesting things. 

This was in the Santa Barbara Mission.

(No, not an LDS mission)  It is an old Catholic mission

that was built in the 1700's.  We got some really pretty pictures there.

I hadn't posted anything for awhile, so I decided to show you a few more of the pictures we took on our trip.  We took a lot.  It was a fun time and we tried to take lots of pictures to remember it by.  The cat picture is there just because she is so goofy -- sweet, but goofy.

Christmas Season is Upon Us!

Don't you just love our new little Charlie Brown Christmas tree??

I took this from the front porch so you could see what others see (at least the peeking Toms might see it this way.)  Don't you just love our Charlie Brown tree?  We went to Aldi and there it was; we couldn't pass it up.  The elders helped us put lights and decorations on the tree.  They are such nice young men.  It's nice that they can share our Christmas rather than being in a dull apartment.

Thanksgiving at Jason & Jeanette's

We had a good weekend in Salem.  We left one Salem to spend our time in the other.  One of the main activities was to go see "Harry Potter", although Alan and I got there kind of late and ended up not going.  We'll see it in Rolla sometime this week or next I expect.

Everyone was so tired that we were a little draggy this weekend. It was good to get together and visit and EAT! Did we ever! The kids were all cute. Danny & Zach loved the back yard. Sierra loved the babies. Andrew loved watching Frosty the Snowman. What did you like best, Dominic? The babies loved eating and keeping people up at night. 

The Barnards -- a handsome bunch

All the "kids" except Aaron

He comes home in February.

This one pretty well explains itself . . .

Andrew was mesmerized by Frosty.

Thank goodness -- it turned out good!

YWIE 2010

Alan fastens my YW Medalion at YWIE 2010.

The young women (and one elder) wearing their tiaras.

The personal progress display table

Here's the "Happily Ever After" castle.  

Yes, it's a cake. 

View of the front of the room.

Here are the tiaras plus some bookmarks with

the youth theme of the year.

We made them each a tiara to take home as well as the bookmark. 

I think they were pleased with them.

 

Yesterday was Young Women in Excellence.  It was a lot of work, but I think it turned out pretty well.  Our theme was "Happily Ever After" taken from a talk given by Pres. Dieter F. Uchtdorf in the spring young women's general broadcast.  We tied in the way the princesses from fairy tales achieved their "happily ever after" to the way the girls will achieve theirs by living the young women values and the standards of the church.  Our decorations were "princessy".  I received my young women's recognition medalion too.  It was a pretty good night.

Cute Photos of Andrew

Hiding behind the chair and clapping when he popped out.

Looking out the window for Grandpa

So glad he's here.

Not sure what he was doing, but he looked cute.

I'll get back to the vacation; we went to Columbia Monday and came back with some cute pictures of Andrew.  He's such a willing subject.

A View of the Rockies

It really started to look Christmasy here.

I wish I could have shown in my pictures how truly beautiful it was in the Rockies.  It's hard to get a picture from the train through the glass as you go speeding by.  Actually they don't speed too fast in the mountains, but when the trees are close to you they blur.  I got lots of those.  Maybe you get an idea though.  I've been working on Young Women in Excellence ever since we got back; it is this Wednesday, so I'll try to get more on my blog when it is over.

Vacation Time

We are in Martinez, California tonight. The elders are watching over the house and Pakamer. We've been traveling on the train since early Monday morning and it's nice to take a break and sleep in an actual bed for a night.  We have seen some very beautiful sights -- especially when we went through the Rocky Mountains.  That was amazing!  We were riding along admiring the beautiful mountains covered with tall pine trees and great rock formations, when all of a sudden it started snowing.  In a little while it began to look like Christmas to us.  Aaron would have loved it.  Probably the rest of you too.  I wanted to share some pictures with you (and I still will)  but I can't get them to load correctly onto my laptop.  I may have to wait until we get a chance to load them onto the PC.  I don't know what the difference is, but oh well.

Here's something we found very funny.  Alan brought along his scanner so he could keep track of what was going on if we got waylaid or something.  So, one evening we found ourselves sitting still and he turned it on to see what was going on.  He heard one man say, "We didn't know you had come in." (to a small station)  The reply from the engineer from our train was, "Sorry, we had our cloaking device turned on."  People are so funny.

I'll check in again when we again have internet service. We don't have it on the train.
Love,
Mom

Great News!

Hey, guess what.  We just got back from a trip to Columbia and one of our elders said, "There's a letter for you from the temple."  Aaron had just been asking me if we had heard anything about the temple thing and I wrote that we hadn't.  Now I've got to write him and tell him that we have been called as temple workers.  We are to call and make an appointment to go talk to them and set up a schedule.  I'm a little nervous about the memorization (it's not my best thing.) but I'm sure the Lord will help out with that.  Working in the temple is such a cool thing and such a wonderful place to be -- especially in these crazy times.  Maybe that, plus babies, is the reason it was time for me to retire.  What do you think??

Busy Two Weeks

My past two weeks have been pretty busy; you can check Amy's blog to see why.  I went up to Amy & Mike's house a couple of weeks ago to help out with the twin newborn foster babies.  We didn't sleep much, but the babies are ADORABLE!!  They are so worth losing sleep over, even though in the middle of the night you'd give almost anything to just shut your eyes for a few hours.

I have to say that I am so proud of Mike & Amy for what they are doing.  They are doing it for the right reason too -- just because it's the right thing to do.  Whatever else happens in those babies lives, they will be blessed for being in that home for the time they are.  I understand that Zach fed one of the little ones tonight.  I am very proud of him too.  I wish I could share a picture of them, but it's not allowed, so you'll just have to take our word for it: they are cute, sweet, and cuddly. 

So I'll just have to share a picture of my baby.  He only has about four months left of his mission.  Can you believe it?  Here he is picking grapes in the church's welfare farm.  They use them to make raisins.  He loved doing it.

I did it!

Guess what I did yesterday?

I earned my Young Women's medallion.

I don't actually have it yet.  It's my plan to wait until we have our Young Women in Excellence program in November and have our branch president present it to me then.  I think it might have more of an effect on our girls and their parents than if we do it at another time.  I really want my girls to catch the vision.

Cutie Pie

We were in Columbia on Thursday so we stopped off at Michael & Karen's house.  I stayed there while Alan had an appointment at the VA Hospital.  I tried all afternoon with no luck to get a good photo of Andrew.  Then when we stayed for dinner, he got all gooey eating pasta.  After eating, he was happy and ready to pose.

Bennett Spring State Park

This a small falls at Bennett Spring

This may be a pump station, but I thought it was very picturesque.

I love these little deer.

I love this little dear too.

We had missionary transfers today.  We ended up driving the elders to Lebanon where Elder Davis moved on to Springfield and we got Elder Lybbert.  He's from Alberta, Canada.  Our elders got the car that the Lebanon elders had, so they drove on home and got to work.  Dad and I on the other hand spent the rest of the day at Bennett Spring State Park.  It was very beautiful there; the beautiful weather we had today didn't hurt either. Sunny, 81 degrees and not humid.  Wow, you can't beat that! 

We took a lot more pictures, but these give you an idea of what it looks like.  The one of the deer was taken through a window, but the deer were actually outside in the wild.  They just had some feeders set up, so those young deer felt free to come up and eat whenever they felt like it.  They were so cute.  When they saw movement they would look up at us, but since we didn't come toward them they didn't feel threatened.  At first we thought they were does, but then we noticed the antler buds and decided they were very young bucks.

Little Garden Friend

I found this little guy standing on our pepper plant.  He walked around hiding behind leaves and peeking out at me.  Then he came out and I shot a few pictures of him  The hardest thing seemed to be keeping him from blending into the background.

A visit from Mike, Karen & Andrew

Andrew and Karen enjoy an Olivia video.

Michael, Karen & Andrew came for a visit this week.  Liz Jacobs Little were here so the Jacobs clan converged in Salem to see her and her husband.

Mike takes Andrew out to experience the rain.  He loved it.

Sorry, I just missed the smile.

Youth Temple Trip

Here is our group outside the temple

We started early. 

This was just snapped out the car window.

Saturday was our youth temple trip to St. Louis.  We only had six youth that were available to make the trip this time.  It was good though.  We also had a new adult member who was able to go do baptisms.  He loved it and can't wait until he able to go again.  Don't you just love the new member enthusiasm.  We need to all keep it.

Crab Volleyball

Amy may get a kick out of this.  About two weeks ago I borrowed her large blue ball for our church youth to use for a combined activity.  We had planned something else and it fell through at the last minute.  Thanks to Amy for the idea and the loan; the crab volleyball game was a huge success.  This picture was taken by me, snapped right before the ball hit me in the face.  Luckily it is a pretty soft ball.  They were kicking this thing pretty hard though.  I had to take my glasses in to be adjusted the next day; they were really cockeyed.  The kids did actually start out on the floor in crab position, kicking it with their feet.  After about half an hour they asked me if they could stand up and still kick it with their feet.  They had switched to that in the picture.

Visit from Michael, Laura & the Kids

Michael posing with the kids

Dominic playing with Sierra

Danny enjoys a good read

Dan & Sierra completed a library project

After we returned from Nauvoo, Michael and family were able to come down for a visit.  They arrived Friday morning and stayed until early Monday morning.  After that they planned to go up to Six Flags for the day.  I haven't heard from them to see how that day went, but thinking back to when we took all of our clan to Six Flags, it was always a good experience for us all.

Karen & Michael's Move Plus Our Trip to Nauvoo

Carthage, IL -- The statue of Joseph & Hyrum from a distance.

The window through which Joseph fell,

taken through the hole in the door

that the bullet made when it killed Hyrum.

The Nauvoo Temple taken in Montrose, IA across the Mississippi River

It really does show up from a lot of places, huh?

Every time "Grandpa" got out the computer,

Andrew climbed up and made himself at home.

About a week and a half ago Alan and I went to Columbia, MO to be of some help when Michael & Karen moved across town to a new apartment.  I told Aaron that I would take some pictures of the move.  When I checked my photos after we got home, all I had was pictures of Andrew.  Oh, well.  I thought this one was cute of him taking over the computer.  There was no keeping him away.

After we left Columbia we drove up to Nauvoo, IL for a couple of days.  I didn't actually take very many pictures this time.  I take so many when we go that I have a large collection of picture of the buildings.  I love that place though and could take pictures all day.  I'm just sharing a couple that I took in Carthage.  It was such a pretty day (extremely HOT, but pretty); take a look at the trees.