I haven’t written anything for a while, but a few things have happened.
The most exciting news is that we are grandparents again. Eddy and Heather had a baby boy on September 21, their first. He was born a few weeks early and took his parents by surprise. Eddy had just been here visiting us the weekend before, and it was great to see him. Then the following Sunday morning, he called us to tell us that Heather was in labor and that they needed suggestions for a name, since they hadn’t agreed on one yet. We all put our brains together and sent an email with a lot of names. They didn’t pick one of those, but by the time they left the hospital on Monday, the baby had the name Merrick William Torriente. Merrick means ruler of the sea, which is a great name when your dad is a surfer, but I doubt he will see much sea in Gilbert, Arizona, where they live. The labor went well and both mom and baby are healthy. We haven’t seen Merrick, yet, but we will go down to Arizona for Thanksgiving. Maybe, I’ll even go down there before. We are excited to see our new little grandson!!
My nephew, Marcus, left on his LDSmission to San Jose, California the same week. In fact, as we were sitting at church, listening to Marcus’ talk, Eddy called Ed to let us know that the baby had been born. Ed waited until after the talk was finished and then he went outside to talk to Eddy. We are excited for Marcus and hope he will have a great mission. He is a little older, almost 25, so I think he was nervous about going out there and dealing with the young immature 19 year olds. Marcus was finishing up his Masters and all ready to apply to medical schools and he will be with other Elders barely out of high school. But he really wanted to serve a mission. I am proud of him!
My niece, Lizette, is here from Sweden. She attends UVU (formerly UVSC) here in nearby Orem. She is staying with my daugher Christina and her family. They absolutely LOVE having her there. I am sure she is homesick at times, but she seems to like it here. Lizette is doing so well in school. Her English is great and she is really smart when it comes to math and science and wants to be a verinarian. She has helped Linnea out with her math a time or two.
We have moved Lisa and her children into a new home. It has been a slow move and has been going on for weeks. We still are not done. It is in the same neighborhood and actually closer to our house, about a 10 minute walk. Danny is not living with the family and they are in the process of getting a divorce. Divorce is always sad and affects a lot of people. We spend a lot of time with the kids. Lisa has been going to school and she will probably work for a while until nursing school starts in January. Brandon just started flag football and is loving it. Alyssa does cheer leading. They all spend quite a bit of time with us. Brandon, especially, comes here straight after school a lot. I am sure they know that they are welcome in our home any time.
I am going to Puerto Rico next week, to visit Sean and his family. I am sooo excited!! It is just for a week, but I look forward to seeing them all. We miss them so much. I didn’t want to go during hurricane season, but I am doing it anyway. Hopefully, the hurricanes will stay away.
Last week, I had Christina’s children for 5 days. They are such good kids and I loved having them. One of the days was actually Grandparents Day at their school, so my mom and I went to that and we had a good time. Lizette was here with us, too, and she is great.
At the same time I had the kids, Ed went on a cruise with his sister, Micki, other family members and friends. It was Micki’s 65thbirthday, and they went on a 3 day Mexican cruise. Micki had a great birthday, Ed had a great time and I am so glad he got to go and spend some time with his family. He doesn’t see his sisters enough. I could have gone, but in booking the cruise a while back, there was a misunderstanding about rooms etc. so to make it easier I opted to stay home, and I am glad I did. Little did I know that I would have Hunter and Cassidy here for those days.
I worked at the church cannery last week for a few hours. We were canning peaches. Part of the church welfare program. They told us that we were canning 20,000 cans per 2 1/2 hour shift and it was going on for a week or so, I believe. That is a lot of peaches. I love helping out there and I do it almost every time our ward has an assignment. I have canned chicken, apple sauce, tomato sauce and other things. I have also helped out at the dry cannery a few times. This time, my assignment was hard and after five minutes I thought: I can’t do this for long. I was the last one to check the peaches before they went into the cans. They dropped into a bath of water and ascorbic acid and went up a conveyor belt at the station I was at. I was standing up and I had stuff splashing all over me and it was also dripping down my legs and down on my feet, even though I had an apron on. I was too short for my position, and had to raise my arms pretty high as the peaches went up on the belt. I found stray seeds that had been left or skin or bruises that others had missed. The interesting thing was, that as I got going, I found that it wasn’t so hard after all. All of a sudden an hour had gone by and then, in what seemed like seconds, another hour had gone by. And then I noticed that everybody on my shift had left and everybody had been replaced by the new shift. You can tell by the different color hats. After a while, a supervisor noticed that I was still there, and he tried to find somebody to replace me, but I stayed there for quite a while after. And I felt great. I smelled like peaches, and looked pretty bad, but I wasn’t sore at all. What is the lesson in all that? I guess there are two lessons. One, that as you serve you feel great, and two, things become easier as you keep at it. I am grateful that our church has so many opportunites to help others. This is just one small part.
Anybody who knows me, knows that I do a lot of crazy things, and I am not afraid of hard work. My hands look like mechanics hands at times or I might have bruises on my legs that I don’t know how they got there. Sometimes, I have bigger problems. The other day, I was emptying out the water out of the trailor and I needed a bucket to catch it. No big deal. So I reached up for a bucket on a high shelf in the garage. I thought the bucket was empty but it was full of car wash stuff. I wasn’t prepared for the weight and dropped the bucket right on my turned up face. I got a cut right by my eye, luckily not bad enough for stitches, and even though I iced it for hours, I have a black eye right now. It hurt like crazy. I guess some people will think Ed beat me. Oh well! Tonight is his missionary reunion and I think Ed is nervous what people will think. I just think it is funny and I am so grateful I didn’t get hurt worse. I don’t use make up, but maybe my granddaughters have something that will cover it up.
I didn’t think I had much to write about when I started. And maybe it is all rambling. To anybody who reads this, I hope your lives are good. Make today a great day!
