Thank you Abella

When we went home for Christmas my little niece kept saying "oh man." It was the cutest thing ever. If you ask Abella to say something she will always mimic you. Lately I have been noticing that I say "Oh man" a lot! I totally picked it up from her and I can't stop saying it.

Book reviews

In the last month I have read two amazing books. The first book is called Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. It was based on a true story. It was about the life Greg Mortenson. Basically he was a climber who tried to climb K2 but failed and when we was up in the mountains he happened upon a small village where the people were extremely generous to him. While he was in their village he realized that they didn't have a school so Greg promised he would build them a school. The book tells his story and how he builds this school, starts a foundation, and is able to build many schools in Pakastan and other surrounding areas. This was also happening around the same time as the Taliban. It is a very inspirational story because Greg Mortenson seems to be a very humble and average man yet he was able to bring so much aid to a very distant and foreign corner of the world. The second book is called The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle. It was such a good book but it was extremely sad. It is about child abuse and it talks about real facts and things that sadly do happen. It really made me think. It is one of those books that opens up your eyes and shakes up your world because it forces you to ponder the injustice that happens all around us but a lot of times we don’t directly encounter it. Fortunately, so many of us don’t suffer from conditions like illiteracy, homelessness, poverty, or abuse but even in our prosperous country many people suffer from these barriers. Both of these books made me really analyze the contributions I offer not just of money but also of my time and talents to make the world a better place. Both of these books explored peoples lives that are a lot more unfortunate than ours but these people are not hopeless. Each book discussed the humble aide that was offered to these people and how it made a huge impact!

The Fam

Over the Christmas holiday we took family pictures. It was crazy as always but this year it was fun doing them with Abella, my two year old niece. The first couple of pictures my brother-in-law was holding her during the pictures but after the first 5 or so Abella started to get bored of doing that so she started acting like the rest of the family and standing in line with everyone else. It was the funniest thing to see because after every picture she would run around the yard and then right before the picture we would call to her and she would run over to the end of the line, which was Tim and she would pose nicely and then as soon as the flash went off she would burst into a sprint around the yard. This process repeated about 5 times and each time when we were ready to take the picture she would pose so good! Maybe she liked being treated like she was older instead of being held I don't know but it was the cutest thing ever and we actually got some really good pictures.

Sunny beaches

This week has been amazing weather. Right now it is 86 degrees and I love the sun! This past sunday after church and nap we went to the beach for a walk. It was so nice out and when the sun was starting to go down. The tide was so low, so it was a great time to look for shells. We found a weird looking thing but couldn't decide what it was. It looked like a sharks tooth or something but it was hallow. Yay for global warming, sorry polar bears... kinda.

Board Games

I haven't posted in a while and mostly its because me and Tim were in Folsom for about 10 days! It was so much fun to just hang out and not have to worry about school or work. While we were in Folsom we discovered two new games. First is called Ticket to Ride it is a fast paced game where you have to build train routes, it is really fun! The second game is called Settlers of Catan, its kind of like an old school monopoly because you build lots of stuff to get points. We were able to play this game a lot because my sister bought an expansion game that basically gives you 5 other ways to play the game!! These games were so addicting we would stay up till 3 or 4am each night playing. For Christmas me and Tim bought ourselves Guitar Hero World Tour which is amazing but we didn't really play it that much because we wanted to make sure we could play the board games as much as possible since we wouldn't be able to take them home with us. On one of our last nights we invited Mary over to play settlers because we always play games with Mary and I knew she would love it like we do. Luckily I was right and once we went home, Mary bought the game!! The first day we played it a lot, I won't tell you how many hours we played for because its kind of embarrassing but it was kind of a marathon of Settlers.