Right after Christmas, we took a trip to California to visit Susanna's mission. She served in the California San Bernardino mission. It was a great trip and I loved meeting the people she served. Our first stop was in Victorville where we met her friend Robert. We drove to San Bernardino and met her mission president and his wife later that evening. The next day, we drove to Newport Beach and met David's family at the beach. It was pretty chilly so we didn't last long but we drove a few minutes to some tide pools which were more successful. Afterwards, we went to a reptile zoo which had lots of interesting reptiles and smells and seemed a little overpriced. David paid for a snake encounter. On Wednesday, we met Susanna's friend Laura and a few of her children. Laura told us about her Christmas tree. She had no money for Christmas but her children wanted a tree, so she tried to find one for them. She went to Walmart and couldn't find anything so she came home discou...

 Last Sunday our family visited a creche exhibit in a private home in Midway. The home owners have collected 1000 different creches from all over the world. This exhibit was just 300 of those but it was still huge. They displayed them according to the area of the world they came from. I took a lot of pictures of them to share. I didn't photograph all of them, but I got quite a few. I loved how each artisan shared according to their language, understanding, and traditions just as God meets each of us at our level, in our language and at our understanding. These were the miniature creches which they providing magnifying glasses to look at. A closer look at the beaded figures from Mexico. In the center of one room, there was a large table with a nativity of 1000 pieces, depicting the whole town of Bethlehem. A few pictures of that follow. In addition to the sublime, there were also some more ridiculous/whimsical nativities: OK, back to the regular programming: The homeowners' gran...