Quick Successions: New Mexico Edition

Hannah and I like to try on shoes at stores with outlandish prices. Every once in a while there is a good pair on clearance for a screamin' deal. This little girl picked these shoes herself and put them on while I was trying one of a similar color. She was a little disappointed to leave them behind. I did find her a good pair of dress shoes through ... at children's shoe store. I am posting two versions: One where you can see the delight in her eyes close up and one where you can see two other women in the background musing at her cuteness. 

We celebrated Pioneer Day this year by making a chocolate cake in the shape of a wagon wheel. Hannah made the cake. I did what I usually do and got all the eggs cracked and oil poured and then turned on the mixer and she dumped the stuff in.  This time she even dumped in the mix. When she got done helping, she climbed down from the chair shouting "I made it, I made it."  We heard that some church people were having a lunch together in a park and so we bought a chicken sandwich from Sonic and went to join them, but we couldn't find the park before I had to go to work. When I got home from work, I made Johnnycake (cornbread) and Brian made a bacon gravy for it. We had chicken and cornbread with gravy and hardtack.  I had never made hardtack before. It is like a cross between a cracker and a biscuit. It tasted really good with jam on it.  Hannah wore her pioneer bonnet we got her in Hannibal, Missouri when we were there in May. She wore it while playing Le...

I thought these pictures of Hannah watering the tomatoes were beautiful. 

This year we celebrated the birth of our country by painting a closet on Thursday, painting the living room on Friday, and putting our house back together on Saturday.  Hannah was a great help.  She executed her assignment to nap while Brian and I worked with aplomb. She also liked going to the local park for mealtimes and to play since our downstairs was in disorder. 

We were married on June 28, 2002 in Oakland, California. For our first anniversary in 2003, Brian had a friend who husbanded horses and she let us come our and ride a couple of her grandest steeds in Benjamin, Utah.  We found a secluded area in the hills and had a picnic and then rode back. Brian was working for Nebo School District and he may have just gotten a job as a migrant coordinator in Provo School District. I had just graduated from Brigham Young University that spring with my bachelors and I was looking for a job.  We had been living in an apartment complex just south of BYU campus called Union Square. I decided that I had enough of apartment living and so we moved to a little house in south Provo that same summer where we lived for two years. While we lived in that little rented house Brian entered a Special Education teaching program and I finished my coursework for my own teaching certificate.  I had been working as an instructional assistant in the ESL progr...

Hannah likes to help me in the kitchen.  She stands on a chair and we cook and bake together. I try to get the stuff all ready ahead of time so she can help me dump stuff in the Kitchen Aid mixer, pot, pan, or bowl.  When we cook something in the oven, I turn the light on inside and she plays in front of it until our food is done and then runs to tell me. She was so excited to make a cake for Father's Day, probably because she likes cake more than she realized the significance of the day. We made a square cake and I drew a tie on it and that's about all I can do artistically speaking with the cake. Hannah wanted cake all day long, and she finally got some this evening. It was hard to keep her from sampling it while we were trying to get a picture.

Today we took a little day trip to some sites owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In particular, we went to Historic Liberty Jail and the Independence visitors center.  The sisters working at both centers had just been transferred there so they were still learning about the site, but they were all incredibly kind. Brian and I actually ran into some of our former students from BYU. Liberty Jail is where the Prophet Joseph Smith and four other spent a long and cold winter in the 1830s on charges of treason.  He wrote several sections of the Book of Commandments while there, which became the Doctrine and Covenants.  Independence is the site where Community of Christ have a temple.  The LDS church has a stake and visitor's center, and other religion also lays claim to a piece of that same 600 acres.  At one point Independence was a center of LDS church gathering, along with Kirtland, Ohio.  Hannah is 19 months old and she wanted to r...