A wonderful weekend full of wonderful work with wonderful people!

At 1pm on Friday afternoon I picked up Megan and Shar and we started our trek down to Los Angeles. We made excellent time, about 2 1/2 hours and got checked into our room at the LA Temple apartments. We tried to get cooled down, the humidity was melting all of us.

Then we headed over to the temple to have temple cards printed, speak with the baptistery and do a session. As we left Rachel made it up from Vista to join us.

It was our Survivor Trip Reunion!! When we made it back to the room it was time to figure out where to eat for dinner. Apparently, I am a very picky eater. Sorry to the other ladies if I squelched your desires for something else, but Rachel found an awesome Italian place not too far away.

I ordered Gnocchi with a creamy pesto sauce. It was amazing!! I had never had gnocchi before.

Megan had a pasta with meatballs, Shar also had gnocchi and Rachel had crab cakes. At the end of the meal one of the owners brought out a complimentary dessert-tiramisu! We don't drink coffee and had to turn it down, it looked so yummy and we felt really bad, but it was what we had to do.

In the morning we got up and ready and went over to the clothing distribution for Rachel to get a new dress. We waited outside and got this lovely shot of Megan!

Then we headed back to the temple doing more work and running into many people from Ridgecrest! We were in the temple from about 9am until about 2pm.

As we left we finally got a shot of all four of us!

One of the reasons for going this weekend was that our Relief Society had arranged for it to be a RS temple trip. Here is part of the crew that drove down on Saturday morning!

Then it was time to check out (and leave my pillow, grrr)

and head over to Fat Burger for some lunch!

We said our goodbyes that will hopefully not be as long and drove on up to Costco, Sonic and home!

I am grateful to Megan for planning and putting this together and for friends that I can have fun with and be uplifted by. 

Wonderful!

Oh the places we went....

Saturday was one of those-see how many places we can cram into one day, kind of days. We were out the door at 7am. This meant all 6 of us were dressed and 4 had eaten breakfast (Emma & I ate in the car). We made it down to the LA temple by 9:10am. I think this was a record and if not, very close. I was able to go in and do some temple work before N8 went in for our Stake Chapel session at 10:45am.
Then the kids and I were off to Target to shop and wander. I had never been to this particular Target and was pleasantly surprised by how clean and well stocked it was. There was a McD's in the same parking lot with an indoor playland so that's where we stopped for lunch.
After we were done I got back on the I10 intending to head back to the temple and just wander the grounds but I saw signs for the beach and on a whim decided that we had enough time. I payed my $8 parking, pulled the towel out that we had under Henry's seat and headed out to the water. I got my work out for the day! Carrying Henry across the sand just about did me in! But the kids loved running up to the water and waiting for the waves to come in.

Henry loved tasting the sand!

This was his first time to the beach.

Then it was back over to the Temple. We spent a few minutes in the visitors center drawing pictures and emailing them to Grandma Handly before N8 was done.

We then started our marathon shopping excursion. We started with a Trader Joes that was close by the Temple. I was pleasantly surprised that parking wasn't a mess (they had parking on the roof), but they didn't have everything on our list. Then we drove up to Lancaster and went to Trader Joe's again and found the rest of what we were looking for. After that there was Sport Chalet (trying on backpacking backpacks for the kids), Costco, Dinner (at Baja Fresh), Sonic for drinks and Vallarta Supermarket for our cheap produce. We pulled in at home around 9:15pm.

I was extremely grateful for the lack of traffic in the morning which allowed me to go into the temple before N8. This made the rest of the day possible. I was also grateful that the temple wasn't as busy at the time I was in there allowing me to do more temple work that I am sometime able to do in this amount of time. I am also grateful the all 4 kids were relatively well behaved most of the time. They enjoyed the temple grounds, beach, shopping and eating and put up with the drive.

We are blessed each time we make the effort to go down to the temple making the sacrifice of time and money to get there. Each time our children see the importance that N8 and I have placed on temple attendance.

Easter, before the bunny...

The kids had today off of school. I'm not exactly sure why, maybe due to Good Friday. N8 took today off and we headed down to LA last night and stayed in the patron apartments. The kids love staying at the temple. I was able to just barely make it into the last session of the evening. While i was in N8 took the kids to the visitors center:

And around the temple grounds:

Emma took her class "pet" Gary the Gateway Gator with us on the trip. He enjoyed meeting Gary the snail:

I feel blessed that we could take this time before celebrating Easter to attend the temple, renew our covenants and remind our children of the reason we celebrate Easter. Of course there will be eggs and the bunny will be stopping by our house, but hopefully they more fully realize that the reason we celebrate is for the Resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ.

My thought are turned to the Savior at this time knowing of the sacrifice he made for each one of us. We as parents make sacrifices everyday for our children and I am grateful for my parents and all they did for me and my siblings. My mom today found out today that the cancer has returned and she will have to undergo Chemo again. It is only with faith and the knowledge of all that the Savior has done for us that I can look at this trial and not have anger. There is sadness, but not anger.

All things California...

We've lived in Cali for 7 1/2 years now, and have really enjoyed where we live. We don't live in your typical California, we live in desert, conservative, hot, dry, remote California. But this Christmas N8's brother and his wife came to visit. This was Erika's first time to California ever! So, we had to do some more "typical" California things for their trip. We took a day down in LA and a great time.
Our first stop was at the Griffith Observatory so we could get some good shots of the "Hollywood" sign! It was pretty cool. Plus the Griffith Observatory is pretty neat too. The kids got to hold a piece of a real meteor and we got some fun pictures with Einstein!

We went onto Hollywood and checked out some of the stars. We saw quite a few while we walked along the streets of Hollywood and took in all of the interesting people!

After that we drove over to Santa Monica to the beach. We got their just before the sunset! It was a beautiful evening.

Then we went over and walked around the LA Temple to look at the Christmas lights.

Our last stop was at In & Out burger! We had been in the car a lot throughout the day and in quite a bit of very typical stop and go LA traffic. Bud had it and must have gotten car sick. Luckily he waited until we were in the restaurant and not in the car to BARF!! I don't think we'll be going back to that In & Out anytime soon!
Christmas Eve we spent doing thing closer to home. We let Bud rest most of the day to make sure it wasn't a stomach bug that had caused the barfing. N8 took Aaron and Erika to the China Lake Museum and then on a hike up in our local hills.

That evening we make gingerbread cookies for Santa, Ricky, Kim and Oliver came and ate tamales for dinner, our 12 days of Christmas givers revealed themselves and we checked out some local Christmas lights.


Today is Christmas and had been a great day. I'll post more about it in another post!

What do you look forward to?

People generally look forward to things like a fun vacation, maybe a night out of the town, but my kids look forward each week to:
Thanks to DVR we record Wipeout on Wednesday night and watch it on Thursday night. This way we can watch it earlier in the evening and fast-forward the commercials! Bud and Emma laugh way more that they do during America's Funniest Home Videos. The big balls are their favorite:
Lately I'm looking forward to things like:
and:
But this weekend I'm looking forward to some peace and spiritual uplifting here:
We might also throw in a little of this:
And for sure this:What are you looking forward to?

Caught a little bug...

Well, this afternoon while the Bud and Emma colored, played with play dough and shaving cream:

I finally go a little of the crafting bug!!! Maybe it's because of my previous post, or it could be that N8 left of travel for the week! A good friend is going to be sealed to her sweetheart this weekend in St. George. I served in the RS presidency with her and am now her visiting teacher. So, I made her this:

She had asked a while ago if I had St. George and I hadn't made it. But I recently worked on a few other temples and also added St George.
Since I was already cutting and had some extra space I decided to try a new method to our "chores" around the house. This will be our FHE for the evening!!

They're made on small clipboards (6x9) with vinyl, magnets, glass gems and some scrapbook paper modge podged on the back! Hopefully they work!!

I also ordered some diamond glaze! When it comes-anyone want to do a washer necklace making party??

I've got chills... they're multiplying

Ok, well not really but seriously I hate being sick and really the timing could not be worse. Saturday night we too the kids to Denny's for dinner (kids eat free!!). So either I ate the wrong thing or I was getting sick anyway. Since early Sunday morning I've been battling the runs. Sunday I also ran a fever and was achy with chills. Augh!!! Tonight I'm having a baby shower at my house so I've been slowly trying to clean my house and prepare food. double augh!!! It's a small shower there will be 10 people at the most, but I still want everything to look nice and be fun.

This weekend we're suppose to head down to LA and go to the temple. We also really need to go to Costco and N8 needs to go to REI and look for new hiking boots for the 50-miler. So, I better be feeling better since we waited until the last weekend of the month to do our temple trip.

Here's to feeling better!!