Recent Happenings

Here are some recent events at our house:

Mindy participated in the 4th grade wax museum which featured prominent Utahns. She chose Minerva Teichert (who loved the color red) since she wants to be an artist when she grows up. It turned out that her kindergarten teacher's father grew up next door to Minerva and was constantly recruited to pose for her. That was a fun connection.

Camille got glasses! Her left eye is weaker than her right eye, so she might have lazy eye, but for now we are trying just the glasses to see if her left eye starts cooperating. She hasn't lost the glasses yet and she has been good about wearing them.

A missionary from our son's mission came home and brought us a nativity set that our son purchased there. It was fun to meet "Elder Mace" and hear a little more about our son's mission. Elder Mace served a lot with our son but wasn't actually his companion.

On April 3rd, the BYU Harris Fine Arts Center had a big gala celebrating its 50th anniversary. I spent a lot of time in the HFAC as a music major. As part of the celebration, I participated in an alumni concert with the BYU Philharmonic. These ladies that I'm pictured with were all friends from college who played in orchestra with. That was more than 25 years ago! It was fun to see them and fun to play with the orchestra.

Easter weekend was very busy with the concert I played in on Friday and then General Conference on Saturday and Sunday. Fortunately we were able to squeeze in our egg coloring and an Easter egg hunt on Saturday.

On Easter Sunday, we celebrated my grandma's 95th birthday which was the day after her real birthday. She plugged her ears while we sang Happy Birthday to her in our traditional loud and off-key way.

She has pretty amazing health for someone who is 95. She is exactly 70 years older than my oldest son who turned 25 on the same day.

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2024 Hansen Family Reunion, Wednesday

Recently we had another Hansen Family Reunion at Bear Lake. We've been having these destination reunions since 2008. There were about 70 of us in attendance. Bruce and Michelle organized the activities and did a good job. I enjoyed myself! Hopefully lots of other people did too. We showed up on Wednesday afternoon and enjoyed a taco salad dinner, served by Neil and Kristie's family. We also worked on two mixer games: a word search with the names of all 100 Hansen family members as well as a Bingo card that involved finding people with different attributes like recent high school graduation, birthdays in certain months, etc. The word search was definitely the most popular. Also popular was playing Nine-Square and Sandy Pickle (a cross between pickle ball and badminton). Thys and Katrina might have won! After dinner, we had an FHE activity/lesson. Liz had made a book with stories of the first ancestors to join the church. She had selected different stories for us to act out in g...

Hansen Family Reunion 2024, Thursday afternoon

For lunch on Thursday, Lauren and Kurt made Cafe Rio which was delicious. On Thursday afternoon, we had free time at the lake. Heidi and Aaron rented a pontoon boat and took people out for rides. This was very popular. Some of us went on the kayaks and/or swimming or just hung out on the beach.

Book Review: Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper

This is a juvenile fiction book about a young girl named Melody with severe cerebral palsy. Her body doesn't allow her to feed herself, speak, or do much at all. She's very intelligent with a photographic memory but she can't really communicate. Finally, in 5th grade, she gets a "Medi-Talker" which is a computer that speaks what she types in. Finally she has a voice. This book explores what it is like to be severely physically disabled but not mentally disabled. It seems like one of the most frustrating of all scenarios. She is completely aware of all the cruelty (subtle and otherwise) that her classmates inflict on her because they don't really want to include her in their activities. One of the saddest moments in the book comes when she realizes that every one of her special ed classmates is kind, where the "normal" ones are not. Who really has the worse disability? The book was a quick read and fairly enjoyable. Wha...

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