Our Family

Rebecca and her family has moved back to Utah!!!  I love seeing them more often!  They moved to St. George where Bryant is a urologist at the new hospital in St. George. For our annual girls night we all drove to Rebecca's and stayed for the weekend.  We had a lot of laughs!  Shopping, swimming, movies and lots of talk time made it such a fun couple of days!

In November (2011) I was released from Young Women's.  I was really sad to leave Young Womens.  Up to that point, I hadn't ever had a calling that I absolutely loved like that one!  I loved the girls and the other women I served with.  I also was blindsided by the new calling to be a primary teacher! When the new year came along, the class I was called to teach was a hard one.  The first few months of that year were rough.  I did not enjoy  my calling.  I loved one little girl who came every other week...she was a cutie.  Another little boy that came regularly was a very nice boy, too.  But this class had a lot of  inactive kids or kids that only came once in a while.  I came to love the other teacher I taught with!  She is such a thoughtful person and I wanted to love the children like she did.  She loved to serve these children and she really did love them - even the hard ones.  She was always concerned when they didn't come on Sunday.

On one particularly rough Sunday, I was sitting next to this boy who had such a hard time sitting through Primary.  He was one that came once every few weeks and I dreaded the weeks he showed up.  He made class so hard!  But this Sunday ended up being a turning point for me.  I said something to him about how Jesus is watching and we need to try to be reverent.  Then he said he didn't even know if Jesus was real.  That broke my heart.  The way I looked at him was different and my goal after that was to love these children and help them to get to know their Savior.  I thought a lot about it the next week and decided they  needed a picture of Christ in their room.  Some of them might already have one, but I knew not all of them did. I ended up making them these blocks in the picture.  After that point, I learned to love all of the children I taught.  Yes, maybe they were difficult and hard some weeks, but I still loved them.  I feel like that's what I needed to learn in that calling - to love Heavenly Father's children no matter who they are, how often they attend church, or how difficult they can be.  Have I perfected this? Absolutely not.  But I work on it and I have learned to love who I am called to serve.

I now play the piano in primary and love it! I love seeing my old class come in, and the boy from the story?  He comes nearly every week now and has learned to be so reverent (I think he's actually interested now)!  I think he is planning on being baptized soon after he turns 8.  My favorite part about my calling now is when I play the prelude music as the junior primary is coming in and they just start singing out loud.  I'll get quite the group singing some weeks.

Justin is an amazing dad!  Before we got married, that was one important quality I was looking for in a husband.  Watching him interact with my nieces and nephews gave me a really good idea that he would make a great dad one day.  Mya and Parker just adore Justin.  He is definitely their favorite (if they had a favorite that is)!  Mya used to tell me all of the time that Justin is her "favorite person in the whole wide world ever!"  He plays with them and knows just how to make them happy when they're sad or grumpy.  Justin is a great provider for our family and I love that he honors his priesthood.

When I heard a girl in my ward was looking for flowers to borrow for her wedding, I jumped on the opportunity to learn how to do flowers.  I've wanted to learn how to do them and thought it was way fun learning how.  My  mom was so kind to teach and help me!  In the end, I was happy with how they turned out and the bride was thrilled and loved them!

We decorated eggs the night before.  That's always a fun tradition.  At least Justin likes to eat the eggs otherwise they'd go to waste.
Easter morning was fun.  The kids had to find their hidden baskets.  Going through them after is always fun.  They get so excited over the smallest things.


The Ropelato Easter egg hunt is always so fun!  The kids get sooo excited for this one with the family!  I love family traditions and holidays give good excuses to start traditions or continue them!

Super behind on the blog...so I was thinking where to start?  The first pictures I found were of Parker's 2nd birthday so I'll start there!