Winter Wonderland of a weekend

7 years ago yesterday I was blessed to take a beautiful bride to the temple and start our lives together. Now our family consists of both of us and 2 cute and very happy children. I am certainly blessed to have such a wonderful family. Jen has given me so much that this year's anniversary I wanted to take charge and try to treat her.

We celebrated our anniversary on Friday by getting a baby sister for the kids and then headed downtown. I had forgotten how busy downtown gets, especially during the holidays. But we eventually got our car parked and we enjoyed dinner at the Lion House Pantry. I was impressed with the place and really enjoyed a good steak. Then I surprised Jen and took her to the Christmas performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra. They had special guests Brian Stokes Mitchell and Edward Herrmann. The performance was wonderful. We enjoyed numerous holiday favorites and some new songs that we had not heard before.

Brain Mitchell sang a song that was from the perspectives of the animals who were in the stable on Christmas eve and what they gave to the Christ child. He sang with different voices for the donkey, cow, sheep and dove. It was a wonderful song and was sang again during music and the spoken word on Sunday. I enjoyed it both times.

Edward Herrmann narrated a story of how the song "I heard the bells on Christmas day" was made, while the choir sang in the background. That was a delight as well.

We enjoyed the evening and look forward to another 7+ years together.

The remainder of the weekend was spent surviving the snow storm, attending a ward Christmas party, looking for a home and spending time together. I enjoyed it and feel that we are close to getting our new home.

Families are forever...visiting each other

This weekend we had the Henry Nelson family reunion. My grandfather on my mother's side had 2 brothers. Each served in WWII and survived to have families of their own. Every year we all have a reunion to get together. It is really fun and a good chance to visit with distance cousins.

This year, my mother was put in charge of the reunion. She asked her kids if they had any ideas for the reunion and any events we could do together. Since I have a problem with keeping my mouth closed, I gave her some ideas on what could be done. Since no one else gave any ideas, my mother asked me to be in charge of the main event for the reunion. We decided to identify one of our pioneer ancestors and profile him to the family. We discovered that my great-great-great grandfather Jeppa Nelson was one of the early settlers of the Pleasant Grove area of Utah and that a Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum had one of the griannery that he built on display. So we planned to have the reunion at a nearby park and I put together a full presentation on Jeppa Nelson that included a tour of the museum that had Jeppa's griannery.

I must admit that I had a lot of fun learning about my 3x great grandfather. He grew up in Sweden and was converted to the LDS church and immigrated to America. He grew up poor but was very blessed to never be in want in his adult life and was very generous to others. He allowed anyone to enter into his unlocked griannery and take whatever food they needed. He was truly a generous and Christ like man and I was proud to teach my family more about him.

In the past I did not enjoy family reunions very much, as they were just excuses to get together and have a meal. But this time, everyone seemed to enjoy each other and many of them were thankful to learn about an ancestor and said they wanted to do this with future family reunions.

I am just thankful that we will not have to plan one again for at least 3 years.