Trip Highlights

On my way to find a place for me to sit down. I'll admit, I'm in a bit of a hurry.

At last! I'm pretty sure mom won't mind.
Kristin, Andelin and Sullivan, not long after Andelin was born.

It may be that her hair is a bit red

Proud Great Granadma with Andelin

Kristin and Craig

A better picture of Kristin and Craig

As usual, I have spent the last hour or so trying to download some pictures so that this post will be a bit more interesting. I guess I will have to just do the written part and hope that Dick won't be too late getting home from his meeting with the Bishopric tonight. I really would love to be able to show you some pictures of my newest great granddaughter, Andelin Grace Mills. A few of you have expressed interest in knowing how the induced birth of her mom, my adorable granddaughter, Kristin, went. Actually she did give birth that very night and the baby was totally perfect. She had a lot of black hair, but the latest picture of her shows that her hair is turning a bit auburn. It looks to have quite a bit of red in it. That wouldn't be too surprising because her grandfather, Perry, has red hair. I guess time will tell.

Kristin herself has had a rough time since. She lost so much blood that she came within a hair of having to have blood transfusions, but managed to avoid that. Her sisters-in-law have provided so much support though. One of them took Sullivan (her two and half year old, enough said ) on Wednesdays and Thursdays and the other one took him on Fridays. That was disappointing to me, because I didn't get to see nearly enough of him to suit me. I think you will all remember how besotted I have been with him since he was born. She had a Nanny who came in to help on Mondays and Tuesdays. That pretty much took up the week. Craig was there to help on weekends. I am pretty sure she is doing much better by now. I need to call her myself to see if I am correct in my assumption. I don't think I've mentioned before that my first name is Grace. They named the baby Andelin (a family name on Perry's side of the family and Grace, after me, as her middle name. Pretty cool, huh?

I seem to have been pretty busy myself this past week:

I knew I needed to see my doctor, so made an appointment for a complete physical for Thursday. Before that, I pretty much didn't do a thing but rest and sleep. We were in the doctor's office for an hour and ten minutes!! He never rushes me whenever I go. He had some great suggestions and I am trying very hard to do what he said. It is really quite funny what happened. He told me that my legs would feel much better if I could lose some weight. Whenever he mentions that (which I know that of course it would help me) I remind him that he could also lose a few pounds and that invariably leads to my asking him if he remembers a bet we had some years ago to see which of us could lose ten pounds the quickest. (I don't remember who won, but the jist of the conversation is that we finally ended up having a three way bet, $1.00 each, to see who could lose 40 pounds by January 13. We each had to put up the money, and he put it in my folder. At the end, the one who has lost the most, wins the whole pot! Dick has by far the most to lose, so he probably will win.

So far, both of us have done very very well. Dick has lost 7 1/2 pounds in five days. I have lost 3 l/2 pounds. We write every single thing we eat for the whole three meals (nothing in between) and total up the calories for the day. Dick can't go over 1200 and I can't go over 800. Well see how it goes. I am feeling much better doing that plus exercising. He is really stressing that! I have to walk on the treadmill for five minutes every morning and on the stationary bike for another five minutes. I am supposed to increase that by 10% every week. Plus we do our 40 minute pool exercises that are supposed to exercise every muscle in our bodies. So far we have done it and between doing those two things, I really have improved. I seem to feel a little bit stronger every day. On Jan. 13 I will post before and after pictures. Hopefully I will have learned to transfer pictures to by blog on my own by then. (Don't count on it though).

I didn't post ALL the highlights of our 10 day Salt Lake trip. We did do more than just enjoy our three day family reunion. I didn't tell about our trip to the cemetary at the end of our reunion. My mom and dad and others in our family were buried in Lund, Idaho, which is a little farming community on the other side of the divide from Lava Hot Springs. We did enjoy the peaceful feeling we all had there. It was so beautiful. The caretaker does such a wonderful job of keeping it up. I may post a picture of me and my grand niece, Beth-Anee. I was pretty worn out just walking to the gravesites and the guy who was supposed to have brought a chair for me to sit on forgot to load it in the car. I had to sit, so had to make do by sitting on Mom's gravestone!! Beth-Anee is standing behind me. She lives in South Carolina and I was so glad that she could be there to represent her family. After we had been there for awhile, just visiting and taking pictures, we left to go back over the mountain where we all had lunch and then disbursed as the reunion was declared to be over. We are going to meet again in two years instead of the usual three because everyone who went enjoyed it so much, even my daughter, Jayne, who insisted on driving her own car there because she expected to be bored, but she had so much fun that we were about the last ones to leave. I am the youngest in my family by far, so all of her first cousins were way older than she and actually she hadn't met a lot of the older ones. She knew the three youngest as they spent most of a lot of their summers staying with us as they were growing up.

This post is a bit jumbled up, but at least I was able to write one. When I started, I can tell you that I sure wasn't in the mood. Thank heaven, Dick came home early tonight. Sometimes he doesn't get home until after 10.00p.m. I am going to turn this over to him and see if he can find a few pictures to post for me. Love to you all.....................

I'm going to post now, so if you find all of the paragraphs and the spacing messed up, I can tell you it was fine at this point and I AM NOT going to call Sue to have her fix it for me.