A Stable Home and Family

"The safest place and the best protection against the moral and spiritual diseases is a stable home and family. This has always been true; it will be true forever."

President Boyd K. Packer

Ensign, May 2004, 79

A Potato Bar?!

So on Sunday we had the missionaries over for dinner, we were having steak and some potatoes, a salad, and some bread. This was a really overdone meal because it was one of the missionary's last Sunday meal of his mission. For the potatoes we were going to have kind of a mini potato bar, and along with a potato bar comes Sour Cream. Mom told me to get out the large tub of sour cream just minutes before we were to sit down and dip luscious pieces of steak into delicious A-1 sauce. I looked into the fridge and quickly got the large tub of sour cream out, opened it................. AND FOUND THIS!

After this that steak or A-1 sauce didn't look so delicious anymore!

MONEY!

When Whitney left on her mission we had to sell her car, we finally did and got 5200 in cash, more money than most of us had ever held in our hands!

We layed Olivia down on the couch to spread her in thousands of dollars, but once we started dropping money on her she started to cry, she's the first girl I've ever seen who doesn't like money!

FACIALS!

One lovely Saturday afternoon Bryce, Dallin, and Caitlin decided to do facials together, just take a look!

Hal's Discussions

Hal just started his own blog where you can discuss topics of all sorts! Here's the site www.halsdiscussions.blogspot.com

The Peril of Hidden Wedges

In April 1966, at the Church’s annual general conference, Elder Spencer W. Kimball (1895–1985) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles gave a memorable address. He quoted an account written by Samuel T. Whitman titled “Forgotten Wedges.” I too wish to quote from Whitman’s account, followed by examples from my own life.
Whitman wrote: “The ice storm [that winter] wasn’t generally destructive. True, a few wires came down, and there was a sudden jump in accidents along the highway. … Normally, the big walnut tree could easily have borne the weight that formed on its spreading limbs. It was the iron wedge in its heart that caused the damage.
“The story of the iron wedge began years ago when the white-haired farmer [who now inhabited the property on which the tree stood] was a lad on his father’s homestead. The sawmill had then only recently been moved from the valley, and the settlers were still finding tools and odd pieces of equipment scattered about. …
“On this particular day, [the lad found] a faller’s wedge—wide, flat, and heavy, a foot or more long, and splayed from mighty poundings. [A faller’s wedge, used to help fell a tree, is inserted in a cut made by a saw and then struck with a sledgehammer to widen the cut.] … Because he was already late for dinner, the lad laid the wedge … between the limbs of the young walnut tree his father had planted near the front gate. He would take the wedge to the shed right after dinner, or sometime when he was going that way.
“He truly meant to, but he never did. [The wedge] was there between the limbs, a little tight, when he attained his manhood. It was there, now firmly gripped, when he married and took over his father’s farm. It was half grown over on the day the threshing crew ate dinner under the tree. … Grown in and healed over, the wedge was still in the tree the winter the ice storm came.
“In the chill silence of that wintry night, … one of the three major limbs split away from the trunk and crashed to the ground. This so unbalanced the remainder of the top that it, too, split apart and went down. When the storm was over, not a twig of the once-proud tree remained.
“Early the next morning, the farmer went out to mourn his loss. …
“Then, his eyes caught sight of something in the splintered ruin. ‘The wedge,’ he muttered reproachfully. ‘The wedge I found in the south pasture.’ A glance told him why the tree had fallen. Growing, edge-up in the trunk, the wedge had prevented the limb fibers from knitting together as they should.”

Whitney's Mission Call

She's going to

SANTIAGO, CHILE

west mission!

And she reports to the MTC on August the 1st. And she's going to learn SPANISH......fluently!

On Friday the 22 of June, Whitney's mission call came in the mail, she was so excited because for almost a week, since last Sunday, she knew it was in the mail somewhere. Every day during the week she anticipated that that was the day that it would come, so when it finally came, she was sooo happy!
But, she couldn't open her very long anticipated letter because Gaila, Grandma, and Caitlin weren't home and wouldn't be home for a couple hours, so she waited for a little while and couldn't take the excitement much longer so she called them on the celly phone and read the letter over the phone, while Gaila cried the whole time!

Happy Father's Day!

He didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. ~Clarence Budington Kelland

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys." ~Harmon Killebrew

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. ~Mark Twain, "Old Times on the Mississippi" Atlantic Monthly, 1874

Disneyland

Caitlin and Bryce had fun on Dumbo, even though it is a kid ride and neither of them have kids, but we are still wondering whether one of them is still a kid in many ways.

Braden and Sadie's family on Dumbo, they all squeezed into one dumbo.

Courtney and Spencer on Dumbo

Spencer and Levi got to play on the Ragtime piano with the piano player, usually they play loudly and have lots of fun on the piano at home, but once they were sat down next to the piano player they played one note as softly as they could!

This is the only picture that has mostly everyone who went to Disneyland, we don't have one picture that has everyone, Whitney, the photographer, and Caitlin are missing from this one.

Braden was picked out of the crowd because he was considered "handsome", and since he got these good lookin' genes, a big black lady sang to him from a balcony and he got to show the world his skills of playing a washboard. He was pretty good, well, of course he was good, he's a Heywood, and Heywood's are good at anything they try!

Inside the line for the Snow White ride, we were told it was for the grandkids, but it seemed to everyone else that Bryce enjoyed it a little too much! No, it actually scared Levi before we got on the ride, he was afraid of the dark.

One of the only few group pictures we have, it was when we first got there and were all energized and excited!