Home Life

Today as we were driving from Angela’s sister’s house to Mom and Dad’s house in Salmon, ID, we came across a family posting a sign on the intersection of the highway and where Carla lives.

Only in Idaho!  This isn’t a sign you’d see posted up on the streets in Illinois!  Turns out that this is an annual thing where people get together and eat the things!  😐  Yuck!  We had a GREAT laugh about this!  I know that there are tons of other weird things like this around the country, but we don’t run unto them every day!  🙂

Today was a pretty busy day!  Angela and I got up early and attended a session at the Ogden Temple.  It was nice to be out of the cares of the world for awhile.  While we were there, we ran into Ted File!  He and his wife Joan moved from Naperville a few years ago and we hadn’t seen them since.  It was wonderful to have a chat with him and catch up on what they are doing.  🙂

After we got back from the temple, we piled the kids in the car and drove down to Bountiful to see Angela’s Grandma.  She’s in her 90’s now and we try to see her whenever we can.  We had a great visit with her and she seems to be doing very well right now.  We wanted to take pictures as we always do, but she was being stubborn and wouldn’t let us, so we “snuck” some anyway!  🙂  We don’t know how long she will be with us, and we wanted an updated “Sarah” picture (all first daughters in the family are named Sarah and has been so for many generations).

We then went over and visited Aunt Mary (Grandma’s sister).  She is not far behind in age and is struggling a little bit with her heart.  We like to go see her whenever we make it out to Utah as well.  She is always on the move and we caught her just going out for her morning walk.

After we visited Aunt Mary, we drove back home to North Ogden and had some lunch, after which Angela and the girls went with Grandma to see Toy Story 3.  Dad and I stayed home while Ben took a nap.  It was great to chat with Dad for a couple hours and just hang out and relax.  He’s doing much better now that one of his heart valves has been replaced and he is on a strict diet and exercise plan.  We were quite worried there for awhile.  The idiot surgeon released him from the hospital when he shouldn’t have been and he almost died of congestive heart failure before he could get back down to the hospital.

Tonight we celebrated Mom’s birthday and Mom and Dad’s anniversary.  We had cake and ice cream, and relaxed outside in the yard.  The weather has been absolutely wonderful!  Some people complain that it is hot, but having the weather in the mid-70s and hardly any humidity is not something to complain about!

Brittany has been Facebook friends with my cousin Carli for quite some time and had been dying to meet her.  She came up with Uncle John to join in the festivities.  It was great for her and Brittany to finally meet each other!  🙂

It was nice to catch up with Uncle John and Carli.  It’s amazing how fast time flies!  The last time I saw Carli, she was about 3 or 4.  Now she’s 19, graduated from high school, and looking at colleges to go to!  Yikes!  It’s hard to live so far away from our family because we don’t get to see extended family very much at all.  Fortunately, on this trip, we were able to see a couple of my aunts and uncles as well as cousins at church and when they stopped by.  We wish we had more time to do that kind of thing, but when you are only out once a year, it’s tough.

Today we had a nice, relaxing day.  We slept in, had a long breakfast, and then got took the kids swimming at the pool (with their cousins) while Ben took a much-needed nap.  The pool was pretty busy but we were able to find a perfect pool-side table where we at lunch.  Zach couldn’t wait to get into the water, but was very frustrated and teary-eyed when he was a hair too short to go on the water slide.  He soon forgot about it and turned into a fish!  We couldn’t get either he or Andy out of the pool!

The kids spent most of their time in the lazy river just relaxing and splashing each other.  The girls got worn out before Zach did so my sister stayed with Zachary and Andy and let them swim for another hour or so while we packed up and went back to the house.  We relaxed the rest of the afternoon and evening.  Dad made some AWESOME pork chops on the grill and we ate them up!

The kids are very worn out and will sleep GREAT tonight!

After driving almost 1500 miles, we arrived in North Ogden, Utah today to see my (Kirk’s) family!  We got up early and started driving to get a jump on all the semi trucks on the roads.  We finally saw rocky bluffs and mountains after 2 years!  We got some good pictures!

It was great to finally roll in and see Grandma and Grandpa Halliday.  They were SO excited to see us!  My Sister Chantelle and her husband Shawn came down with their kids and we hung out and relaxed.  It was nice not to be driving anymore!  🙂

Today we started on our 2-week family vacation/trip out west to Utah and Idaho.  We are going to arrive in Utah on Saturday and stay through Thursday.  We will then spend the next week in Idaho and come back home on the 4th, just in time to pack up Sarah and Brittany to go to EFY early the next day!

Normally we leave to drive out west around 4:30 or 5:00 am, but today we didn’t leave until about 11 (I worked part-day from home).  It’s always hard to see the trip odometer start out at 1 mile, because you know that you have over 1400 left before you arrive at your first destination!  😐

Our trip went well!  We made it out to Sydney Nebraska before stopping for the night.  The kids were really good and the best traveler award today went to Ben!  🙂  He was an angel the entire day and never cried!  Whew!  We traveled for about 900 miles today.  We are very tired and are not looking forward to the longer day than normal tomorrow.  We have about 600 miles left before getting to North Ogden, UT.

Today Brittany turned the ripe OLD age of 14!  She was SOOOO excited!  One of the main reasons is that now she gets to go to church dances!  She has been excited about that for months now!  After I got home from work, we had a family party for her.  Brittany went to the store with Angela and got a large variety of Indian foods that sounded pretty good to her.  We cooked all of the food up for dinner.  Some of it was pretty good, while some was “eat once and never try again” food!   🙂  We all had pretty active stomachs afterward from all the spices and the curry.  Our favorite was the potato Samosas.

After dinner, Brittany opened presents and we ate cake and ice cream.  Zach and Kirstyn set up a “birthday throne” down in the basement where Brittany sat to open her presents.  It was very sweet of them to do.

Brittany’s favorite part of her birthday was our Indian dinner.  I don’t think the rest of us felt the same way (especially that night when we went to bed), however!  🙂

Happy birthday, Itty Bitty!

Today was a wonderful day!  I didn’t go into the office, but instead drove up to Kraft’s world headquarters in Northfield (Chicago suburb) and attended a re-connect for the Midwest Regional Leadership Forum (RLF).  This event was much larger than just our class of 2009.  There were people there from as far back as 1997!  Our 2009 group had the most there in attendance, however.  I think that it was pretty close to half.  We are a pretty close group and to have 19 of us there to share the day together was great! 

The event started off last night with a dinner at Kraft’s R&D kitchens.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make the event.  It sounded pretty fun!  Everyone put on aprons and they cooked their own dinner in a huge room of kitchens…  kind of like high school home ecconomics on steroids.  🙂 

Today’s event was wonderful!  We started off with the CIO of Kraft speaking to us as the keynote speaker.  He had some wonderful things to say that were very inspiring.  His main focus was “don’t be afraid to screw up.”  Fear of making mistakes stops innovation in its tracks. 

We then had some other discussions around innovation (with a group activity), around what we have learned since the last time we met, and we discussed a book by Marshall Goldsmith called “Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if You Lose It.”  In this book, Marshall shares the ways in which to get–and keep–our Mojo.  Our professional and personal Mojo is impacted by four key factors: identity (who do you think you are?), achievement (what have you done lately?), reputation (who do other people think you are–and what have you’ve done lately?), and acceptance (what can you change–and when do you need to just “let it go”?). Goldsmith outlines the positive actions leaders must take, with their teams or themselves, to initiate winning streaks and keep them coming.   Mojo is:  that positive spirit–towards what we are doing–now–that starts from the inside–and radiates to the outside. Mojo is at its peak when we are experiencing both happiness and meaning in what we are doing and communicating this experience to the world around us. The Mojo Toolkit provides fourteen practical tools to help you achieve both happiness and meaning–not only in business, but in life.

What a great experience!  I’m looking forward to next year’s Midwest re-connect which will be in Milwaukee at We Energies.

Today, Angela and the girls helped out at a wedding open house.  It was for a young man that I had in my seminary class when he was a freshman!  😐  It’s crazy to see time fly.  One day you’re teaching a shy 14-year-old Church History, and the next day he’s returned from his mission and is getting married!  Where did those 8 years go?  🙂