Enter the Family

I'm doing a family blog in addition to this personal one now, and I must say it's causing me to sadly neglect this one more than I probably should. I need to figure out a better balance to maintain both properly, but in the meantime, I'm just trying to make it a week at a time. All that is basically just my lame excuse for not doing a report sooner on the family coming to visit for Elliot's baby blessing last month. To be fair to myself, it was overlapping with my ward's Temple Challenge Day, which I talked about last time, so that ended up getting priority writing simply because I was more concerned about losing the revelations and miracles of that day by not getting to it until later.

Needless to say, I am always very happy when my family comes to visit, specifically my parents and my grandma as they live some distance away. Grandma and Dad were not here for very long, but Mom was able to stay for awhile so I got to do more things with her.

Everyone came in on Thursday night, and basically that evening was devoted to just catching up a bit. Friday night was Marinda's bridal shower at her apartment, so the early evening was spent helping prepare for that as Elisabeth did all the tasty food for the event. The shower itself went quite well, I'd say. One of her roommates had prepared a number of games like trying to throw candies into the cut-out mouth of a huge picture of her fiance Paul's face and making Marinda put on a bunch of ridiculous clothing in a hurry while she was blind-folded. Mostly, it was an opportunity for her to celebrate the wedding with her college friends as those folks probably won't be able to attend the actual wedding festivities.

Saturday, as I talked about before, I spent entirely in the temple. Fortunately, Dad and Grandma, who were around the shortest both came and did a session and sealings with me. I was very glad to get to see them there for that time. When I first learned that the Temple Challenge would be moved to the same time my family was in town for a short period, I wasn't thrilled about having to sacrifice something precious to me when the original date would have been much easier. I decided, however, that it was the right thing to do, and fortunately, the sacrifice ended up being mitigated much more than I would have expected.

On Sunday, I attended my own ward then rushed over to Gerrit and Elisabeth's house to wolf down a bit of food and grab a picture before we had to be over to the church for their ward to begin. The blessing was lovely, of course. It's always enjoyable to be there for the baby blessings of my nephews and niece. So far, I've been lucky enough to attend all the blessings, though I know that might not always continue to be the case.

 
I had to take Dad to the airport, and we left right after the blessing finished, so we rushed out, but fortunately made good time and got to SLC without a hitch. Since the family were all still in church and I still had a presentation to prepare about the ward temple challenge for a stake meeting, I just went home and geared up until my meeting. That went off quite well, and I'm hopeful it will continue to be inspiring to get wards across the stake more involved with family history work. I can't really remember much else from that evening, so while I went back to Gerrit and Elisabeth's, I think we just played some games or something.

Monday and Tuesday also ended up being pretty low key, as far as I can remember. At least, I can't think of anything especially noteworthy to report. On Wednesday, I took Mom to the family history Institute class I'd been attending for the semester. It was a case study day, and one of the case studies was on the Beno family on my mom's paternal side. We haven't been able to extend that line back very far, and we have a lot of Slovak research to do on that side of the family, so I figured it would be nice to get someone else to take a look at it and see if we could find some helpful new resources for Czechoslovakian research.

Most of the sources the teacher, my friend Krista who works for Ancestry, found were ones that I was already aware of, but she was able to find a new sibling I didn't know about before and she has a good way of looking at sources to construct a cohesive story about people, which was interesting to hear. She'd also found a site for genealogical research for the area that I have hopes will be quite useful to us in the future.Using it, she'd been able to interpret some of the column titles I hadn't been able to figure out with Google Translate.

 It turns out that Zuzanna Beno had indeed been born out of wedlock as I'd suspected and her mother had probably had another child who also was born out of wedlock. What isn't as clear is if this was a scenario where it was listed in the church records as out-of-wedlock simply because the husband was of another religion or if he really wasn't in the picture in the traditional sense that they were never married. Because he isn't listed anywhere, I'm afraid it might be pretty hard for us to identify him for a long time if not permanently, but it was nice to find some new resources and I hope we'll be able to make some progress there. I was glad Mom was able to come as well since we were talking about her family.

On Thursday, we went to dinner with everyone, then Marinda and Paul came along with Mom and I to visit the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point. I loved the festival last year and wasn't disappointed again this year, though some of the bed designs were less impressive to me this year than last. Unfortunately, we also only had about an hour to see everything before the gardens closed, which was too bad. We had to keep moving pretty efficiently, though each area merits a good bit of lingering when there is time. Still, we had fun, and it was nice to not have to go on my own for once.

On Friday, we met up for dinner with everyone again before heading down for the first night of the Payson Temple open house. The downside was that the weather was pretty bad and most of the family weren't dressed for how cold it was, but we didn't have to be outside for too long, fortunately. Payson definitely is a beautiful temple. It has a lot more detailed and abundant stained glass than most temples, which was lovely. The design feature of the temple is apple blossoms and I learned after the fact that the vines in the glass start out pretty sparse in the baptistry and then fill out as you move upstairs until you finally see a lot of apple blossoms in the sealing rooms.

The whole place is of course beautiful, but I was especially impressed by the baptistry. It had a lot of beautiful dark wood in it and the walls were covered with murals of the outdoors. Honestly, it was quite possibly the most lovely baptistry I can remember seeing, and I've seen a lot of them. Murals in baptistries are already fairly uncommon, from what I've seen. I can only remember the Idaho Falls Temple actually having one, but that one only covers the upper walls which Payson's extend from floor to ceiling. I have a number of baptisms to do at the moment, and I've determined that I will get those done in Payson once it opens.

It will be enjoyable to do all kinds of work there once it opens. At only about 20 minutes away, it is about as close to me as all the other temples in the area, besides Timpanogos, of course. Doubtless it will be quite crowded for awhile at least, though. City Center opening should cut the traffic down a bit, but it will be a bit of a wait on that one, no doubt.

It was fun to get to go to the open house with the family rather than by myself, which is probably what I would have ended up doing otherwise. It's one of those things that is much better when the family is all there. Really, it was probably good that more people were around to help with the kids. Especially since Molly had to be carried the whole way as she didn't like the booties. It was definitely a good way to spend the last day before Mom, Marinda, and Paul left for Virginia again.

Having the family around for awhile was very nice. It did pretty much throw all my normal schedule out the window, but it is great to shake things up sometimes. Even so, I did find myself missing going on ward visits especially more than I expected. It's funny how it often takes not doing something, even for the best of reasons, to appreciate its great personal value.

Next time I will see most of the family will be at Marinda's wedding. That's a weird thought! It won't really be all that long from now. They got some of the things, like the wedding dress, squared away while I was at work, but it seems like there is still a lot left to prepare for that. Between everything going on and coordinating so many people coming and going, it was a pretty crazy week and a half, but certainly a wonderful one.