Aspen Grove

For Spring Break our friends the Warrens invited us to Aspen Grove for a couple of days. Aspen Grove is some property owned by BYU. It is up Provo Canyon (Alpine Loop) past the Sundance ski resort. BYU uses it to host parties for many of their camps and clubs. They also rent it out for family reunions and other such activities. We went up Monday and came back Wednesday.

We celebrated Lauren's 14th birthday there. Can you believe she is 14? She is no longer a Beehive.

Cute picture of Lauren with her loot

Lauren and her birthday muffin

There was tons of stuff to do there. Here are some of the activities we did while we were there:

Old fire truck to climb on (Joseph)

Ryan loved playing aerobie on the field

Joseph loved the mini golf

Ryan and Joe playing racquetball. Ryan could have played all day.

Joe also loved playing "pool ball" in the game room.

Ryan lining up the air hockey shot

Some of the activities that we didn't take pictures of:

• Tennis courts
• Shuffle board
• Swimming pool (frozen over this time of year)
• Disc golf course
• Swing set
• Hiking (could see the trail head to Stuart Falls from our room)
• Several outdoor basketball courts
• Miniature western town for kids to play and climb
• Climbing wall
• The game room had three pool tables, two ping pong tables, two foosball tables and air hockey
• Conference room with huge TV
• Craft center (not opened while we were there)
• High-bounce trampoline (not opened while we were there)
• Two racquetball courts (one of which could be used for wally ball)
• Rumor has it that there was a shooting range as well, but I didn't see it.

All of the equipment for the sports activities was provided.

Did I mention that it was in a beautiful alpine setting?

Back of Mt. Timpanogos

It's probably a bit pricey and may not even be available, but anyone for a family reunion there?

We had to high tail it home on Wednesday because Mark had an appointment to get his wisdom teeth taken out.

Mark just after surgery

Marsha said he was really giggly when he woke up from the surgery. Mark has no recollection of that.

Six on Easter

Today is Easter Sunday. It also happens to be Joseph's sixth birthday. He's not a little kid any more. Here are some pictures of the festivities.

Party with the playgroup: Andrew, Marcus, Joseph, Bryan and Cannon

Traditional birthday pancakes

Opening soccer nets

More than anything else, Joe wanted an Easy-Bake Oven. He got one from Aunt Val

Fishing pole from Grandpa and Grandma Sorenson

What better cake for an Easter birthday than a bunny cake? Love the strawberry bow tie.

We had an Easter egg hunt. Hunters: Cozi, Mark, Ryan, Joseph and Lauren

Happy birthday, Joe. We love you.

Happy Easter everyone.

Rise and Shout!

BYU officially notified applicants of their acceptance status on Friday. Mark is officially in! He is pretty excited, as are we. We weren't too worried about him getting in, but it's always nice to know for sure. They don't release scholarship information for another month or so, so we don't know about that yet. Here's hopin'.

In typical Mark fashion, he knew for about six hours before he told us. He found out just as he was getting ready to go to work. Marsha wasn't home and Mark didn't have time to come find me in the basement to tell me. He was working and we had gone to some friends' house for dinner, games and a movie. Mark was home when we got home, but he still didn't tell us. We had a voice mail from a friend congratulating Mark on getting in to BYU. Marsha and I stormed the piano room (where Mark was playing) to ask him if he had something he wanted to tell us. He sheepishly told us the news. He said that he didn't text us because he wanted to tell us in person, but by the time we got home it was old news.

We had to kid him that we probably wouldn't find out about his mission call for three weeks and his engagement for over a month.

Mark is pretty sure that he is going to BYU. He has scholarships offers to attend other schools, but he really wants to participate in the BYU flagship program. According to the BYU flagship website, "The mission of the Chinese Flagship Center is to create global professionals who can function culturally and linguistically in the professional Chinese world."

In a nutshell, you study your major classes in Chinese. After three years, you spend a year in China at Nanjing University and have an internship in China. Mark is pretty excited to be involved in it.

In addition to his BYU news this week, Mark also had his Sterling Scholarship interview this week. Each school in a Utah region can nominate one sterling scholar in science, math, music, foreign language, computer technology, business, speech/drama, visual arts, social science, english.

Mark was his school's nominee for Science.

To see a newspaper article about the nominees, click on this link. The Lehi Sterling Scholars are in photo 8 of 19 accompanying the story.

Mark did not advance to the next round. We thought he would have been able to advance in music or foreign language, but it was not to be. We are very proud of Mark for his accomplishments. He's a great kid!

Bubble Boys

Ryan and Joseph were in the tub the other day. They had lots of bubbles in with them. Marsha took these pictures of them.

That really is Joseph under there.

Ryan in the bubbles

P.S. I thought about naming this post, "I'm sorry. It was the Moops."

Say Eight

So Friday night Marsha said she wasn't feeling very good. She thought it might have been bad beans on the burrito she had for dinner. She took some Tums and went to bed. The next morning, she still felt lousy. Right after lunch the pain was increasing, so she decided she needed to get to the InstaCare (of course it was a Saturday.) She fully expected the InstaCare doctor to send her home for rest. Instead he noticed that her white blood cell count was elevated and she was running a fever (symptoms of some kind of infection.) That coupled with the pain made him send her over to the hospital for a CAT scan. The results weren't conclusive, but they suspected appendicitis.

From the CAT scan, we headed to the emergency room. The surgeon on call concurred with the other doctor that it was likely appendicitis. They recommended an appendectomy. Lauren had been watching Ryan and Joseph. We called Valerie (Marsha's sister) who immediately headed to our house to help out - including picking up pizza for the kids for dinner. While we were waiting for things to proceed, we called our home teacher. He happened to be home and available, so he made a quick trip to the hospital for a blessing.

At 7:15, Marsha was wheeled in to surgery. The surgery lasted for just under an hour. The surgeon came to find me in the waiting room and said, "That was one angry appendix! It wasn't ruptured, but it was all but." It's good we caught it when we did. There is now one fewer angry appendix in the world.

The first thing Marsha said when she came out of surgery was, "My belly button hurts." The next thing she said was, "I assume they took out my appendix because I feel a lot better."

Here is a picture of Marsha just before surgery. She gave me permission to post the picture and the post-surgery quotes.

Just before surgery

We did get in some good contextual Brian Regan lines at the hospital. ("Tell 'em you're shot!", "A two maybe the high ones", "Say eight!") We kicked around the hospital for a couple of hours and Marsha felt pretty good, so we headed home just after midnight.

Marsha is recovering well. Before the surgery was done, we had someone (visiting teacher) lined up to bring in dinner for today. We also had someone volunteer to take the kids tomorrow (holiday from school for them, but not from work for me.) We have since had people say they would bring us dinner for the next few days. Some friends stopped by with a loaf of fresh-baked homemade bread. Most of the ward knew about the surgery by the time church started today (9:00 AM.) The huge and immediate outpouring love and concern from caring friends and family is somewhat overwhelming. We really do have great friends and family.

Fun Gifts and Christmas Traditions

We had a really fun Christmas this year. We did most of our traditions that I have written about before.

We put together a gingerbread house:

Ryan's favorite part is smashing it on Christmas day

Joseph had a Grinch play for school. He was a Who from Whoville.

We had our traditional Eureka Christmas Eve dinner of crab salad and clam chowder
We went to look at the lights (the mansion and the dancing house were our favorite)
We did our nativity. Nobody cried or yelled, "No be konkey!" this year (first time in years.) Belle was a sheep.

We had our Christmas Eve treasure hunt. Ryan and Joe got Perry the Platypus PJs. Lauren got Mickey Mouse PJs and Mark got just PJs.

Santa came to our house

Lined up to check out the loot

Self-powered slot car race track for Joseph

Lego Millennium Falcon for Ryan

Melodica for Mark (see details below)

Cell phone for Lauren

For those of you who haven't heard of a melodica - it is a cross between a harmonica and an accordion. You blow into a mouthpiece and make notes by pressing the keys. For American Idol fans, Casey Abrams played one at the end of his audition. I recorded a brief clip of Mark playing the melodica.Click here to see the clip. The song he is playing is from the powerhouse harmonica video that Lauren posted on her blog a while back. Click here to see the blog. You may recognize the song from old Bugs Bunny or Tex Avery cartoons. Mark had no idea he was getting it. It was fun to watch him open it and try to figure out what it was.

Probably the funniest present was in my stocking. First a little background. For those of you who have not seen the Bad Lip Reading youtube clips, check them out on Lauren's blog here. The one that is relevant here is the one from Rick Perry. When he is meeting the fire fighters and shakes each one's hand, he says, "Tuna, Eggs, Doritos, Cheesecake, Tamales." As I pulled each item from my stocking, I found the following:

A little creativity was needed for the cheesecake (yogurt) and (hot) tamales, but it made me laugh.

Here is a picture of Ryan's completed Millennium Falcon. It is pretty cool.

The Sumpters came to visit before Christmas. We went to temple square to look at the lights and then to dinner at Sweet Tomatoes. They came again after Christmas. We went to the Thanksgiving Point Dinosaur Museum. We had a great time with them. We didn't take too many pictures, but here are a couple.

Mitchell with a present

Karen, Steve and Miranda

We celebrated New Year's with some friends and actually stayed up until midnight for the first time in a while.

We hope you all had a great Christmas and have a great 2012.

A Big Week

Wow, what a week!

We had a couple of events pending. The grandparents were going to be here, so we decided to cram as many important events into the same week as we could.

Ryan turned 8 years old on Sunday 11/27. He had a party with friends on Saturday (complete with pinata, pin the fly on the chameleon's tongue and freeze dancing) and a family party on Sunday.

I love the look of pure happiness at the sight of Legos

Cute boy with his birthday apple pie

Since Ryan turned eight years old, that means it was time to get baptized! Grandpa and Grandma Lindsey came to town on Monday and Grandpa and Grandma Sorenson came to town on Thursday. (You would have thought the sets of grandparents were the oldest and dearest friends with the amount of conversation flowing between them. It was fun.)

The baptism went great! Grandpa Sorenson gave a talk on baptism and Grandma Lindsey gave a talk on the Holy Ghost. I ran into Quentin L. Cook in the bathroom after we changed our clothes. We are proud of you, Ryan!

Derek and Ryan getting ready for the baptism

Ryan with Grandma and Grandpa Sorenson

The whole group after the baptism

Ryan's new baptism scriptures

We had a lunch at our house after the baptism. We had four kinds of soups, salad and rolls. It was delicious. Because of a scheduling change with the baptism, we had to scarf down the food and head to the church for Mark's Eagle Court of Honor. He finally finished! We had a very non-traditional Eagle Court of Honor. We didn't do the typical scouting things you might expect. Grandpa Sorenson talked about scouting (pulling double duty with his baptism talk as well.)

Mark played a Mozart's Sonata in D on the piano. Before he played, he said, "This is something that you've probably never heard at a court of honor." He was probably right. You can see the the video of him playing by clicking here.

Marsha and I both did a little Mark tribute (i.e. embarassment) and Grandpa Lindsey presented Mark with the Eagle award.

Grandpa L. presenting the Eagle award

Mom and Dad with the newly minted Eagle Scout

Great job, Mark. We are proud of you!

Lest you think that the fun was over at that point, we were just getting started. Since Grandpa Lindsey was called as a Patriarch, he is able to give Patriarchal Blessings to his grandkids. We figured that this would be the perfect time for that to happen. Sunday after church was the selected time. It is a pretty awesome experience to listen to your child receive a Patriarchal Blessing (own personal scripture) and even more incredible to have grandpa give it.

Mark and Grandpa L. just before the blessing

Both Grandpa and Grandma Sorenson and Grandpa and Grandma Lindsey were going to leave on Monday, but both changed their flights to be able to attend Lauren's piano recital on Monday night. It was a Christmas recital. Lauren played "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." It was a really fun version of it and she did really well. Unfortunately, my camera malfunctioned and I was not able to get a video of the performance. Hopefully I can get one from grandpa to share at some point.

After the recital, we went to dinner at Chili's (should be called Salty's) We had a fun time and Ryan and Joe demolished a Chocolate Lava Cake like piranhas on a cow.

Eating at Chili's

In addition to the above, we also attended a live Nativity in Alpine that was really nice. We had several dinners together with Sorensons, Lindseys, Lindseys and Ogborns. Lauren also found riddle buddies in her grandpas. It was super cute to see her sitting there chatting with her grandpas.

We are glad our parents could come and visit. We had a great time with them.