For our Come Follow Me lesson this last Sunday, our grandchildren were going to be visiting so I decided to make it a treasure hunt.  They're pretty little, so anything to hold their attention would have to be active. I listened to this podcast last week ( https://bookofmormoncentral.org/come-follow-me/book-of-mormon/come-follow-me-2020-jacob-5-7 ) and got some ideas.  The first scripture was read inside the house:   Jacob 5:3   For behold, thus saith the Lord, I will liken thee, O house of Israel, like unto a tame olive tree, which a man took and nourished in his vineyard; and it grew, and waxed old, and began to decay.  I asked, Why are we like trees?  We talked about that, then I asked the question, Where can we find some trees?  The front yard! We went to the front yard and found the second paper in a peach tree.  The paper had this scripture:   Jacob 5:4  And it came to pass that the master of the vineyard wen...

Here in Utah, all church has been cancelled along with all school and any other large gatherings in an effort to minimize Covid-19 from spreading further.  So today we had church at home and I have to say it was really enjoyable.  We had an opening hymn (our teenage son played the piano), a prayer, a sacrament hymn, the sacrament, and then we had everybody read an article from a church magazine and share it with us.  We sang a closing song and had a closing prayer. We had a treat--apple cranberry pie--and then we moved into our Come Follow Me lesson.  We decided to make it pretty interactive (better class retention) so we contructed a Tripod of Truth with  Jacob 4:8 being our jumping-off scripture. Each leg of the tripod is a way that we can recognize revelation from God:  in our heart, in our mind, and by the fruits.  We all looked up a scripture related to knowing what is of God. We wrapped up with this final scripture: ...

This last Monday my brother and his family came to town for a few days from their home in the Midwest.  They were dropping off their daughter at the MTC for her mission in California.  While they were here, they organized a short get-together of my extended family at another brother's house.  There were about 30 of us there which is a little less than half of our full number. I'm actually not sure how many there are these days so let me count: 52 grandchildren, 5 great-grandchildren, 5 in-law grandchildren, 11 children, 8 spouses, and 2 parents=82.  OK, there's more of us than I realized. We sang a few songs, had a short lesson, played a big group game, and then had donuts for treats. Our family's contribution was the game.  It's a little hard to come up with a game for 30 people of all ages in a confined space.  What we came up with was "The Name Game".  The game works like this: You pick any name and write it down on a piece of paper....

This winter my husband decided to buy a season pass to a local ski resort for the first time ever.  Our son who is a senior in high school bought a season pass too and Scott wanted to be able to spend more time with him.  So he took the plunge and bought one. He has really enjoyed it and has gone about once a week since the second week of December to get maximum use of his pass.  After a while he decided it would also be a good idea to teach our younger daughter to ski.  So he took her a few times to the tow rope, which is pretty easy, and then this last weekend he bought her a night skiing pass and took her up for a couple of hours. She's still very much a beginner but she's slowly getting more comfortable on skis.  And I'm really pleased that she gets to spend some one-on-one time with her dad while learning how to do something hard.  That seems like a really good thing.