Dominoes

For a while now, my mom has told me about her game nights with friends, where they play Dominos. I always thought "Dominos, that is such a kids game" (because we played it as kids) But this Dominos is different from the Dominos I played when I was a kid.
This Dominos is called Mexican Train Dominos and as you can see they go up to 12 instead of just "6". There is a lot of strategy that goes into it and I found that out as I came in 4th out 5 people. It was a lot of fun though and isn't that was game night is for - to have some laughs and get together with friends. I think I will have to get this game and introduce it to my family and see if I can beat them. (probably not, but it will be fun trying)

Thursday in San Diego

We got up this morning and decided to give Mom a perm. I usually do this for her when I am here, just to make it easier for her.
Mom - with her curly hair
It looks like it turned out pretty good.
We later decided we needed to do some errands so we hopped in the car to get a screen fixed.

We found a guy down in Santee, who was really nice, he even let us come back and watch him fix the screen.

When he found out I lived in Utah he asked me if I was LDS and said that his Brother in Law was LDS. So we had a nice chat and Mom left him a pass along card. Cool!

Then we went to In-N-Out for late lunch early dinner. It's been a while since I have eaten there. It's one of Derek's favorite places. The rest of the day was filled with other little jobs and errands. It was a good day!

San Diego - San Diego!

So I got to go to San Diego for my annual Feb-Mar trip. I have been doing this for over 10 years, to visit Mom & Dad and it has been such a pleasure. Now that Mom is moving to Utah, I won't get to do this anymore, but that's okay, because I get to have Mom closer to me in Utah.
Mom took me out to Hometown Buffet and showed me her tires on her car and one of them was down to the treads, so on the way home we stopped at discount tires and got a set of new tires. I guess her alignment must have been way off because the way they were all wearing it was strange. We still need to get them aligned. We will probably do that in the next couple of days

While we were waiting for the tires to get put on we went next door to a CVS and were killing time and Mom pulled her camera out so I pulled mine out - Dueling Cameras.
Then we went over to Henry's which is a grocery store, that is like a farmers market, I guess. Mom likes to shop there and so we got pictures again. I look like I am having a good time, and I am.

"Behold Your Little Ones"

So a couple of weeks ago, our Primary Stake Presidency was given the assignment to have a display and a Presentation for a Provident Living Fair. Our assignment was Preparing Children for provident living. That is so much information to condense on to a poster and a 15 min presentation. But after much research and two weeks of thinking of nothing else. We got it done. The fair was really good and had a lot of information on emergency preparedness. I just hope it motivates us to get better prepared. Anyway, here is our display that we had in the cultural hall. This constitutes 2 weeks of work.

Be My Valentines

Valentines day is usually a day where I get to go around and deliver my valentines to my grandchildren, but when I woke up and looked outside - it was snowing - again. So as I was making plans to trek down to Spanish Fork, I got a knock on my door and my Valentines came to me. Jacqui brought me a bag of walnuts (which was way good, because I was just beginning to run out) and she baked us a loaf of whole wheat bread. It was so good.

Kaitlyn was having fun inspecting her candy in the sippy cups I got them all.

And then before I could get out the door to deliver the other ones, here comes Kathryn & family. They were so cute and excited to see if they got any valentines from Grandma.
Here is a better picture of Janette. She is getting to be so grown up.
Kathryn made me this tile and it goes perfect in my Front Room. It has my sentiments on it exactly. That is what we are supposed to do on this earth. "Love Much" So Derek & I finally got off to go visit the rest of the grandkids. We first went to Jeph & Hannah's to see their kids.

I think this is the first picture of us with them. We are so looking forward to getting to know them better. They are such cute kids and fun to be around.

Then last but by no means least, we made it to Dan & Alicia's and interupted their Valentines dinner. They had made a turkey and we sneeked a few bites - yummy - it was so good. The boys were so cute. Haden is such a poser and I actually got a picture of Connor looking at me.
For me, my sweetie gave me roses a couple of days before and took me out for dinner on Valentines, but as you might know the resteraunts were extremely full and we had to try 4 different places before we settled on a Chinese Buffet. I love my sweetheart. He is so good to me.

The Mission Call

John received his Mission Call today, so we gathered family and friends to come and watch him open the call. All of his brothers and Sisters came and all his nieces and nephews were there, along with many friends. We all went around and made predictions of where he would go and it pretty much covered the whole world. He is sitting here with his nephew Logan who predicted he would go to "Logan" the city. Below is a video of him opening and reading the call.
John is going to the Hong Kong, China Mission. May 20th - We are so excited for him! He will learn to speak Cantonese, unless his Mission President has other needs. It is so nice to finally know where he will be for the next couple of years.

Making Dolls

We have a group that meets once a month to do Humanitarian Aid projects. So before today the Sister who gets the projects brought over these dolls that needed sewing together and turning inside out, so that the ladies could stuff them. So I finished sewing them this morning and then later in the afternoon I went to one of the Sister's home and we stuffed them and worked on another project.It was so fun to sit and visit with these sisters. Some of these sisters were in my ward years ago but still live in our neighborhood, but we don't get to see them much, so it is nice to reconnect. I am looking forward to doing some more projects. The funny thing is that we stuffed the dolls with the leftover lead threads from the serger machines that the church uses to sew garments. I am amazed at how thrifty the church is and how they use everything. We have a sister that goes up to the Humanitarian center in Salt Lake and gets projects for us to work on. Pretty neat, to be able to work on something for someone else and also gab.By the way, they will put hair and clothes on the dolls later. I know they look pretty pathetic now.

Birthday Bash

We all got together on sunday which just happened to be Super Bowl Sunday, but our purpose was different. We wanted to celebrate family birthdays. We had two in January and one coming up in February, so this was a happy medium. First Birthday was Derek's. (I won't even tell you how old he is, but we got him a shirt in Hawaii that says "Older Than Dirt") You can tell his grandchildren just love to be around him.The next birthday was my son, Alan's. He turned 24 this year. I had to stop and think about how old he is this year. (I'm getting too old.)
The last birthday celebrated was for my new grandson Cameron. He is turning 9 years old on Feb 14. He belongs to Jeph and Hannah's new family.Even though they are getting older they sure look happy about it. Everybody enjoyed themselves last night and I think the funnest thing was that Derek likes to give everybody else presents for his birthday, so we enjoyed ourselves shopping for everybody while we were in Hawaii. He even managed to surprise me with a beautiful black pearl necklace that will remind me of our trip to Hawaii.

Last Days in Paradise!

We're home now from Hawaii, but I thought I would post the last of my pictures and the last of our adventure. We left Maui and took off to Oahu, so we could visit the Polynesian Cultural Center. This is the third time I have visited and a lot of things remained the same and I am sure there was a lot I had forgotten, but it made for an enjoyable day. In the top middle picture is Poi. They let us taste it. It was not the most appetizing thing in the world, but maybe with a little salt...it was pretty bland. We stayed at the Turtle Bay Resort that night and it was a beautiful place. We had a private Lanai, so we just opened the windows that night and closed the shutters and enjoyed sleeping to the sound of the waves. They were pretty loud but that was good because it drowned out the sounds of partiers in the next room. On one side of the hotel was a beautiful and calm bay and on the other side was crazy waves and I did see surfers out there.The next day we were leaving but not until late in the evening so we explored the island. We saw some skydivers take off and come down. Pretty cool. We found this little surfboard museum and I found this surfboard and got a kick out of it.Then we went up on the north west side of the island and found that they allow people to live on the beach or maybe they don't but there sure were a lot of them that looked like they had lived there for years. It was not a beach I would frequent anyway. We had a great time and it was so hard to come home and get back into real life again. But it's great to be around family.