My father is now a Bishop!

Bishop McLaws

So last sunday we went to my father's sacrament meeting in the Adobe Villa ward.  Kristen and I met in that stake in the Mountain Park Branch.  So we know a lot of people and it was fun to see family and friends.

The sacrament meeting went well.  First the Stake President Dale Willis announced from the pulpit that Bishop Kerby would be released and Bishop McLaws would be called.  This was followed by a sustaining vote and a vote of appreciation for the past Bishop.

After the sacrament was passed, we all got to hear from Bishop Kerby and his wife, Bishop McLaws and my mother, and Bro. Gardner who had been called as 1st counselor.

It was a very spiritual meeting and very enjoyable!  Afterwards we all gathered in the Stake Offices to make the calling official.

The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting Mom Erickson, Bella, and the family once again.  We helped Mom Erickson set up her new VCR/DVD combo and then we had a delicious dinner with the McLaws side of the family.

All in all it was a great and wonderful day!

The fun stuff that we did this weekend was that we got to see "Captain America" which was a wonderful movie!  Kristen and I went and saw it in the morning on Saturday, we both sincerely enjoyed it!  After that we went and picked up my car from the shop because it was having an oil change, and we went to the Cheesecake factory!  We went there because all cheesecake was half off if you dined in.  It was absolutely delicious and we got the Orange Chicken to share.  Kristen got her Adams Peanut butter slice, and I got my Chocolate Tuxedo slice!

Later after walking around the mall, I went to work and Kristen came home and cleaned and got some time to relax! :)  She is amazing and I love her soooo much!  :)

Our amazing family cabin trip!

Well this week was quite an adventure as we went up to my grandparents cabin in overgaard. All of the immediate family was there: Dad, Mom, Cheryl, J.R., Esther, Kristen, myself, Faith, Julia, Barbara, and John boy! we had a fantastic amount of fun and I will give you a break down of what happened each day! Monday: We drove up to the cabin. On the way out of town Kristen and I stopped for a free slurpee from 7-11. I had not realized that when they do those free slurpees on the date 7-11, it is a very extra small cup. After that we met up with the family at my parents house, hit the gas station for one last stop and then drove to overgaard. Overgaard is about 2 and ½ hours from Mesa. We did stop at Payson for some groceries from Walmart and then Kristen, Julia, Faith, and I went and got some breakfast from Mcdonalds. We soon learned that this would be a grave mistake....we all started to feel a little sick from the food within the next day or two. When we finally arrived at the cabin and unloaded all of our belongings, we had a delicious lunch of springroll wraps. There were many different things that could be used to make the wraps. We all thought it was funny that Barbara chose to use cheetos, chicken, and cheese in her wraps! After lunch Kristen and I went to take a nap for a few hours while others napped. or just relaxed. Then when everyone was moving again, we started our family merit badges. First on the agenda was LOOM A HAT! This was taught by Faith and since most of us had already loomed our hats, she taught us additional crafts and items that we could loom. One that my wife really liked was the pumpkin crafts. This used a smaller loom and was made up of orange yarn. She worked on it all week long and was able to finish up her pumpkin towards the end! It looks awesome! The next merit badge was CPR/First Aid who was taught by Esther. She taught about all sorts of emergencies and medical catastrophes that we are likely to encounter living here in Arizona! Upon finishing up the merit badges, we all gathered round for a great feast of Dads famous tacos. I did get a a slight burn while helping Dad to prepare it and everyone joked about the first aid techniques that we had just learned. After dinner Julia helped to demonstrate how to make gluten free peanut butter cookies which were most definitely amazing! She also cooked up some sugar free brownies...now I was not so fond of these as they were more like the consistency of corn bread. But as my brother said "if you are going to eat corn bread, wouldn't you rather that it be chocolate?" I guess that does have some pretty good logic. lol Tuesday morning we got up and ate smoothies and bagels at about 830 and then headed to the local fish hatchery. It was really cool and my Dad explained that the hatchery bred and grew the fish that were then used to stock the rivers, streams, and lakes up on the rim. We got to feed the fish and see fish of all different stages and sizes. Then we headed to woods canyon lake and had a delicious picnic lunch. Cheryl had put in all the necessary preparations and it was delicious. It was funny when Barbara realized that there was pudding and so she started yelling "pood-ing I need it"! After that Julia and I went crawdad hunting while Kristen watched Barbara and read her book. We really did catch a lot of crawdads and got to cook those up later on back at the cabin.  It was cool because when we started boiling them, all of there shells turned bright red! Dad showed us how to shell and eat them. They didn't have a lot of taste but for the most part they tasted a lot like shrimp. Unfortunately the fishermen didn't have any luck and so later on Saturday morning they went to try their luck once again. However there still were no fish to be caught. Anyways after having dinner and cleaning up, Cheryl did her merit badge over General Conference. She had us read off our trivia sheets that we had filled out previously.  With each correct answer we earned a rolo!!! She also helped us to recognize the prophets and apostles voices. Then Mom did her merit badge on temples. We all filled out a global chart to show where each one of the more than 130 temples are located. It was a really cool activity and helped me to learn quite a lot about the temples. Wednesday we got up early to go to the temple in Snowflake. It was such a beautiful temple and thanks.to my wifes foresight, we took a bunch of pictures outside on the temple grounds. Kristen, Mom, Cheryl, and I participated in Endowments while J.R., Julia, and Dad did baptisms. The rest of the family met us afterwards for lunch at the local Mexican restaurant. We quickly learned that the food was amazing but the service was horrible!!!! Our waiter completely forgot about us and the only reason we ate anything was because Esther bothered a waitress and let her know that after 15 minutes we still hadn't even ordered our meals. She quickly took care of the situation, took our orders, and had our food out quickly. Mine was delicious...I had the chili relleno! Afterwards we stopped at Dairy Queen for dessert!!!! Then we headed back to the cabin to relax and nap for the rest of the afternoon. After an awesome spaghetti diner was prepared and devoured, we participated in the Spanish merit badge and then we played a bunch of games for Julias puzzles and games merit badge.  The craziest game we did was thawing out a frozen t shirt!  This really took a lot of silly ideas: sitting on it, breathing on it, folding it, etc... Eventually we got it thawed out!!!! Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were a lot more chill. We were all pretty tuckered out so we just hung around the cabin, went for a birdwatching hike for Faiths merit badge and watched movies and played games. We did three more merit badges on thursday: J.R. taught about dutch oven cooking, Kristen taught massaging, and Mom taught hair cutting. Friday Dad taught how to make duct tape wallets and I taught story telling. Esther also taught the Book of Mormon merit badge and that finished all of the badges. Saturday we woke up, ate left overs and then drove home! All in all it was a great week and its too bad that it had to end!

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latest blog

so it has been quite a long while since I posted on my blog.....but I promise I have a really good reason!!!! The entire month of June, I was extremely busy working on two classes at ASU. They were very intense courses that moved along at a rapid pace. To give you an idea of what my days were like, I would wake up at about 8 am, go to work at about 9 am, be there until about 6 pm, come home and eat dinner with my wife, clean up and put things away, do homework until about 11 pm, get ready for bed, and finally go to sleep just so I could wake up and do the same thing all over again! In other words it made me very busy and that was pretty much how it went for me all through the month of June. The classes I took were Spanish classes...I took Spa 428 which was about literature in Latin America from 1880 to the present. I also took Spa 472 which was about the history of the discovery of Latin America from the civilizations of the Aztecs and Olmecs to the present. I sincerely enjoyed the history one and I was able to earn an A+ while I did not enjoy my literature class and even though I put in a lot of study time, I earned a B- in that class. I think that shows that even though someone might put forth a lot of effort and work, if it is not an enjoys le subject because the understanding or knowledge does not come as easily as other subject knowledge might, it can be difficult to be successful and earn satisfactory grades. For this reason I am very happy that I chose a degree about the language that I sincerely enjoy: SPANISH!!!! Even though there are a few classes that have been difficult for me, for the most part it has been a very enjoyable degree! :)Anyways I will move on to explain what Kristen and I recently eperienced...a week ago Saturday, we had the opportunity to go to Africa!!!!!! It was amazing! We visited Kenya and other amazing countries and lands....ok so we didn't really go to Africa but we did go to" Out of Africa", which is an amazing wildlife park north of Phoenix, near to Camp Verde. We decided to attend the wildlife park because we had scored half off tickets via our e mails. When we first arrived and made our way through the gates, we were admitted onto a safari tour where we got to feed carrots to a giraffe, look at many unique animals from Africa, and we all got to see Humphrey!! He was the camel that likes visitors :)It was fun to see the giraffe named Kebo and he liked us visiting so much that he stuck his long neck inside the bus so as to get some more snacks from the bus driver!!! After the safari tour we got to go see boom-boom the rhino, lions, tigers, lemurs, grizzly bears, and other fun animals! I imagine that there in the heat, many of the animals were tired and thirsty and so for that reason...they were pretty much all hidden away! we did get to be up close to a few of the animals...the porcupine, the iguana, one of the cool birds, and a big snake!!! Plus after we had hiked up to the Arena, we got to see Tiger Splash!!!! Tiger Splash involved a white bengal tiger who chased toys and balloons and eventually jumped several times into the large pool, making big splashes!!! we also got to see the Grizzly bear cubs as they played with their caretakers and went swimming several times. they were lots of funand really behaved like loveable dogs! it really was a lot of fun but it was very very hot!!!! After we finished at the wildlife park we drove to our camping site at clints well. the camping site that we planned on using turned out to be full so we ended up going to a different site just a few miles behind where we had planned. it was an awesome site!!! it was an established area but it was definitely not full and we got a spot that had no one around! we had plenty of water and supplies and we had a good time playing scrabble to the light of our new propane lantern. it was great until all the bugs started coming out and they started flying into the lantern...then they would bounce off and hit our game board. Finally a big nestle came out and when he bounced off the lantern he landed on his back on our game board and he couldn't flip over. I tried to help him but I think I picked him up too high and then we dropped back down on the board, he must have gotten knocked out! Because then he wasn't moving around at all until about 15 minutes later when we finally went back to bed.The following day after waking up and eating breakfast, we headed down to the lake that was nearby. it was potato lake and I decided to go swimming in it because im basically crazy!!! the temperature was really nice and it felt good to be in the lake bit then I stubbed my toe really bad on a big stone. I thought for a while that I had actually broken it. Luckily it was just jammed and healed properly after e couple of days! After all of that we went to another camping site to meet up with some of our extended family. they camped a little bit east of payson in a designated campgrond that we actually had to pay for. it was a decent price and it included some amenities. All in all it was fun and we finished off the weekend with a bbq at my parents and then watching 4th of july fireworks!!!!! well that's me getting back to the blog finally and next week I will be able to comment and share our family vacation at the cabin! :)

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