Easters through the years!!

With Andrew, Noah and Eliza.

Dresses I made.

Fun with the Kerksieks.

Easter bonnets!!

The Easter spent in SLC.

Pinafores and braces!!

Looks like a Winne the Pooh year!

Terrill Family Egg Hunt with Grandpa!!

Terrill Family Egg Hunt in Corona.

Dying eggs in the backyard - denim rules!!

Egg hunt in our backyard.

Egg hunt in Palmdale.

Bonny's first Easter.

Ara's first Easter!

Cosmo gets in on the act!

Hopefully we'll see you at the Easter parade sometime!!  Wonder why the girls gave up bonnets and Noah gave up suspenders - also known as "braces!!"

Genesis 17:17

Yes.

The things you see in Monrovia!

Harry was at Home Depot and saw this White Heron on the wall, and then it flew away.  There is a wash at the side of the store, so he drove over there to see and then took these pictures.

 

When he looked up "Great White Heron," he read that their native habitat is Southern Florida and the Caribbean.

Either this is not a Great White Heron, or it's a Great White Heron that has strayed!!

Either way it was an impressive sight.

More Cub Fun!!

Had another great pack meeting last night.  Have I told you how much I love Cub Scouts?

 

I always think of how much fun Phoebe had in Cubs when I see Isla enjoying it too!

 

Porter is doing well at getting his awards!

 

Sister Rossiter is a great Den Leader too!

 

And we can always count on the Guerreros to come and support our activities.

We had an Easter Egg Hunt - they were decorating their bags here.  Prior to that we had another "hunt" but they had to find eggs that had words to the Cub Scout Promise and Law in them - and then had to assemble the words in the right order.  It was fun - and they did a good job.

The Cub Scout does indeed "give good will!!"

"The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, bring promise of merry sunshine . . ."

It is once again that lovely time of year when daffodils are cheap and plentiful at the market.  I love it.  I love their cheery yellow color.  I love how they bloom day by day and greet me each morning with more splendor.  I will be sad indeed when the season ends!

And it's also the season for the lilies to bloom in our yard.  It is the only flower I have ever grown in abundance.  I love that there are so many of them.  And that they are beautiful too!!

Happy Spring everyone!!

Friday - the favorite day!!

This was a busy week.  March is the beginning of the end as far as school is concerned.  It's time to get ready for Spring Break, time to get ready for state testing, time to get ready for all the end-of-year stuff that goes along with teaching.

And it was Open House this week too.

Students are getting Spring Fever - and it will last until June - believe me.

But we always get through it.

Friday is one of the ways we get through it!!

The weekend that was!

We had so much fun on our Grandma's birthday weekend, Miss Esme, Grandpa and I, that I hardly snapped a photo - in fact, this is the only one I did take!!  Eve joined us Saturday afternoon - and here they are mining for treasure in the Grandma's Treasure Box!!

We saw Oz the Great and Powerful, had manicures, shopped and ate and watched movies - as well as playing with the American Girl dolls!  We girls do know how to have fun!!

 

We took Esme home and then enjoyed a lovely dinner at Chez Bolander - always a great place to eat.  Here she is in her new Websterville costume - she is one of the gentry!!

 

Friday night was the Annual Ides Fest - Bolanders, Terrills, Whites, as in Bill and Sandy, and a lone Combe made up the guest list.  But the Bard would undoubtedly have been tickled by our performances.

 

Some folks like to start clowning early!!

 

The director - directing, of course!!

 

On Wednesday night, Marjorie and I motored out to GH where my mom was honored at her ward's Relief Society birthday party.  A great meal - and each of the women they honored - I believe they were the older women in the ward - and Mom was the oldest - told long-ago Relief Society stories that were fun to hear!!

A good week - now to get ready for the next one!!

A new look!

There are folks in this family who thought they'd never see this door painted!!  Miracles happen!!

 

Both sides of the door painted!!

 

Finally slept under the new skylight - it was lovely waking up to the breeze wafting through the neighbor's oak leaves.  And the soft "Peach Blossom" wall paint - with an Ecru ceiling - and can lights.  We have lived like moles for so many years - the light is de-LIGHT-ful!!

Poco a poco is our motto!

Adjusting to the new time

I usually hate the first Sunday after the time change - because I am usually all goofed up!!  So it was nice to get an invite from Harry and Dawn and family to join with them in sampling Marjorie's delicious tri-tip - and Dawn's blueberry-raspberry crepes!!  

A lovely meal with lovely company.  Can't beat that combination.  Of course we chuckled about how last year at this time, Harry, Dawn, and family nonchalantly strolled in to 9 a.m. church at 9:55 a.m. - thinking that they were 5 minutes early!  And it actually took the closing song, closing prayer, and someone telling them what the scoop was before they figured it out!

Some even remembered that today!!

Dad and I did that once too.  But we were over an hour early - not sure which is worse!!

And the new game of choice at the Terrill household is Monopoly!!  Takes me back to my childhood!!

A picture - wonder what the story is??

Mom identified these two as Ted and Byron.  We are hoping to set up a visit with Byron to see if she's right. 

I do see a resemblance.

But goats?

The boys - including my dad - went and stayed with friends and relatives after their mother died.  And they often stayed on farms, so maybe seeing goats isn't so odd.

But they look a little dressed up to be working on the farm!!

A long ago afternoon

When I came across a small contact strip with photos that appeared to have my mother and at least Joan in them, I hustled over to my trusty, neighborhood photo guy and asked him how big he could make them!  (they were each about an inch square!)

This is one of them.  At first I thought it was the little house - but it's not.  For one thing, we never had a fence like that, and Mom said she never had a table like this one either.

After some thought, Mom said it was her neighbor Ruth Prue's back yard - in Burbank!  The girl in the chair in the foreground is Joan,  and Lyn is one of the towheaded boys in the shot.  Mom is under the tree.  There are 3 other shots on the contact strip, so I will have them enlarged also.  With more detail, we can make some closer IDs maybe!

Actually I remember Ruth Prue - but not from Burbank. Their family at some point moved out to Pearblossom, and often when we drove to Utah, my parents would stop there to say hi.  Every time we went up or back to BYU, we would stop there, so it's a somewhat clear memory for me.

I love old photos - and the stories that emerge.  I can just image my mom as a young mother, having lunch outside with the neighbor.  I have had outdoor lunches like that - and maybe even have some photos - I will have to look!

Really, some things never change!  (and Ruth is obviously a with-it young mom with a cool apron!!)

A family snapshot or two

This is the older of these two photos by not by a whole lot.   There are not a lot of photos in our family history - at least not our immediate family history - and so they seem all the more precious when they turn up.  I know my dad had a camera - in fact, I took it to France in 1965 when I went to school there.  It was one his brother Paul had brought to him from Germany after the war.  It was complicated - I really didn't know how to take pictures with it very well.  I took slides in France and keep meaning to get them made into prints.  As the years go by, I wonder if it would be worth it - I think they are mostly scenery.  The older I get, the more I want a photo to have people in it  - people I know!

Of course the plus to this shot is that it includes Grandma and Grandpa Stevens - and it's exactly the way I remember them!  My mother was 35 in these photos - which would make my dad 38 - which as we all know is really very young!!

I recall the Christmas day when Grandpa Stevens walked me around this house while he held on to me and I held on to the wall until I could go on my own on my new roller skates.  It's a very favorite memory of mine.

Another plus is the view of the little house and the orange trees - and the bike - that was maybe Lyn's?  Or Joan's?  I remember that Joan was hit by a car on her bike as a girl - broke her leg I think - so I know that we had bikes!!

And my Grandpa Stevens always wore hat!!

Thought on FHE

I've posted this before - the shot of Richard coming to FHE with a bag over his head so he wouldn't get into trouble!!    I thought about it tonight as our weekly FHE once again turned out to be whatever we were doing anyway!!

I always thought the biggest FHE challenge was how to appeal to a diverse group of young children - ranging in age from teens to toddlers.

And now I see that as you get older - and there are no kids at home - the problem becomes how to appeal to a much less diverse group - in fact, you might even say a homogenous group - who pretty much forgets most of the time to even call it FHE!!

Occasionally I say things like, "Shall we go to the show for FHE tonight?" when there's a show I'd like to see.  Or "shall we invite so and so over tonight?  We can count it as FHE!"

I have often thought over the years that I had pretty much been a failure at FHE.  I felt like we hadn't held it regularly enough, or made it compelling enough.  But then I hear our kids say that they felt like we always had it, so I guess we held it often enough - and it was memorable enough.

We had a few Monday night traditions.  Harry was often not home for dinner - but he pretty much always was there on Monday nights.  And we weren't big on dessert, but we always had it on Monday nights.  Maybe that's what the kids remember.

And once we had some skilled pianists in our midst, we always had music.

And the Ides of March celebrations were often held on Monday nights.  They made nice FHE events.

And who can forget Family Olympics?  Or mock graduation ceremonies. Or watching Little House on the Prairie on Monday nights and calling it FHE?

I think the lesson here is that we just have to keep going forward.  We do our best, and we are not too hard on ourselves.  I guess if I asked Harry, he'd probably feel that we had a significant Monday night sit-down more often than I think we do.  

And we still pretty much always have dinner together on Monday nights - a habit from long ago - one that probably contributed to some kind of stability over the years.

But I do miss the piano playing!

Old times!!

If you click on this, it looks like my mom and dad on a camping trip - probably with his younger siblings and young step-siblings too.  I'm really not sure of the identity of the others in the shot.  But we have other shots of my mom and dad on this same camping trip, so I'm pretty sure it's them.

I have so many old photos - and I really need to get them in some kind of order - especially while there are still folks around who can help me figure things out!

Others say retirement is the answer.  I say that some kind of organizational set-up where I can start sorting is the key.

I will let you know how it goes.

And maybe post more photos.  (For example of the negatives I found of some kind of airplane - on the ground - and old cars and bikes all around it - wish I'd asked my dad about that one while he was still alive!!)