My first weekend in Virginia

John and Angela were baptized by Jacob! This was a wonderful day... Cindy was good and invited a lot of friends to the baptisim. This was the first experience with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for many... I was able to give the talk on the Holy Ghost and I was a bit nervous seeing as it would be a first for so many people. People were able to see many important ordinances in one day, ordained to the Aaronic priesthood, baptisim by immersion, and then recievinig the Holy Ghost... a day packed full of LDS ordinances!

The family pictures were actually taken on the following Sunday...

Saturday was pretty busy!

Grandma and Grandpa Phillipps, Ray Vejnar, Aunt Cherice

Craig, Robin, Megan, Sammie, Silvester, and Lillie

were able to be to attend the special event!

Jacob and the twins!

John kept saying he felt like an angel and new he could fly.

Angela was really excited herself.


Jacob did a fine job baptizing them!

Unfortunately Dale was still in Afghanistan and unable to attend the event, he was missed.

Man... if you don't stay on top of this... you kind of get behind :)

So I knew when I got back from Virginia, more than two months ago mind you, I knew I would post more about my wonderful stay there... and my life... well... i kind of bombed on that one didn't I.

I am so incredibly grateful that I stayed a month longer in Virginia!!! I just adore my nephews and nieces and spending extra time with them was amazing! Before I left my sister had them write a list of things that we had done together... some of the lists were different for each child... and that is how it went. It was wonderful realizing all of the memories that we had created together. Now if I had only written all of them down at the same time... I would be able to remember all of those things as well! But alas I did not and now I am going to try and recall some of those awesome things. It turns out that some of the most ordinary things became some of the most special activities.

I guess it would be more apporopriate to write down each activity in my jornal so I won't bore you with all the details... but some fun things included reading stories together, answering their questions... in fact i was lucky enough to have my 8 year old niece ask me what it meant to make love... yes i did give her an age appropriate answer. I do think it is important to answer kids questions accurately no matter how difficult it might be to answer. I realized more and more how wonderful family life really is... it is so hard at times... but so rewarding. Kids are demanding and they do want to be recognized for what they do... who can blame them? I think all of us want to be recognized for what we do each day. What would the world be like if we actually were able to recognize each other for their efforts? I imagine it would be much better than it is now! That was kind of a tangent... moving on.

It is nice being an aunt and not the mom... for instance when the kids are fighting over something really silly I can sit in the background and laugh because often it is kind of ridiculous... but when you are mom... you get to make the most of it and hopefully teach a lesson along the way. However... Mom's out there.. you are SO Lucky!!! Your kids LOVE you so much!

Now I feel like I get a pretty large amount of love from my nephews and nieces... friends and family... but it will be incredibly amazing to have the love of my own children one day!

There will be some catch up posts along the way!

new hair cut

I totally chopped off 11 inches of my hair. I went to my friend Katie's for a bit about 3 weeks aog and decided to get a trim from her hair girl. Well, Katie convinced me to donate my hair which meant I had to cut at least 10 inches off. This is the result.........