Seven for Sunday (4th edition)

1

My cousin Jessi's mother-in-law was interviewed for the Mormon Channel radio show "Enduring it Well," Her son died in a tragic hiking accident when he was only seventeen (Jessi's husband was serving a mission at the time). It was a really touching and beautiful interview and made me think of some of the people I know and love who have experienced devastating losses of their own. I thought I'd share the link with you here. Go listen.

2

Week one of summer vacation was great. We spent every day at the park for lunch. In our area they serve free lunch in the park throughout the summer months to kids ages 1-18. My boys love it. We've gone every summer since we moved to Boise. We usually head out around 11:30 or so (after Zach's morning nap) and are back around one for Owen and Eli's afternoon nap. It is nice to have a summer routine of sorts to break up the day and get us all out of the house for a couple of hours.

 3

This past weekend our stake had a special Super Weekend Spectacular for the youth. I serve in Young Women so I was up bright and early Saturday morning for our 3 hour service project at a park downtown. It was a gloomy rainy day which ended up being a blessing because we were kept busy spreading bark around park trees and in the playground area. The cool weather made the work more pleasant and kept the bark dust to a minimum. I always love doing these kinds of projects with the youth because I am just so impressed at their enthusiasm and the sheer fact that they will get up early on a Saturday during their summer vacation to come do hard labor for free. The theme this year is "Arise and Shine Forth," they sure did that and it made me really happy to have the chance to work alongside them.

 4

Another part of the Super Weekend Spectacular was a Roadshow on Saturday night. Each ward's youth put together a 5-10 minute show and performed them for the entire stake. The place was packed! I haven't had a lot of experience with roadshows and I've heard people either love them or hate them but you can count me in the love them category. We took our boys and they loved it. I'm a sucker for silly Mormon jokes (ala Divine Comedy, Single's Ward, etc) so this kind of thing was right up my alley. Plus, I was really proud of our youth and all their hard work. Great night.

5

I'm reading a book right now called Mindless Eating. My mom recommended it to me when she heard I was trying to lose the baby weight. It is fascinating. The author is a researcher and professor at Cornell and runs a lab there. One experiment I just finished reading about was called "The bottomless soup bowl" and basically went like this. Students were invited to a restaurant to talk about the cafeteria program. They were given a free soup lunch in return for their feedback. The bowls had a secret tube that kept the soup flowing into the bowls so as they never finished eating their soup! People actually didn't notice. One guy ate an entire quart of soup! What the research was trying to say was that we often don't stop eating when we are full but more often when the food on our plate is gone. So if the food is never gone then we never stop eating (well of course we do, but just a lot later than we probably should). I'm only about a quarter of the way through, but it is a really interesting read.

6

This fellow is still as adorable as ever.

 7

 My boys are currently fascinated with volcanoes. Their last fascination was tornadoes and we watched Twister with them for one of our family movie nights, so when they started talking non-stop about volcanoes we rented Dante's Peak and watched that one with them. It's sort of fun to watch these older movies because it leads Tim and I to discuss where we were when we first saw them in the theaters when they came out. I have a clear memory of seeing Dante's Peak with my family at the theater near the Orem mall. I don't know why I remember this so clearly, but I do. I've also introduced Marcus to Bill Nye the Science Guy. I remember watching that show in junior high. Marcus loves him. I wanted to show my boys Honey I Shrunk the Kids because I thought they would love it, but the guy at the rental store said they didn't have it and he didn't even think it was available in dvd. Oh well. What movies did you love as a kid?

Happy week, everyone!