April/May/June 2013

It is amazing how quickly time flies by!

In April, we not only got snow (see previous post),  but we also celebrated Seth's birthday.  Mike made his lovely German chocolate cake. 

Mmmm, chocolate. ;-)

Katie's birthday was the same day, but she was not here :-(

The end of May we took a trip to Provo/American Fork/Springville to decorate graves.  We also visited with living relatives and some friends.  Below is an acquaintance of  Berenice's from years gone by.  Tom somebody.  I didn't catch his name, but they had a nice little visit in American Fork.  You can see Mike and Gayela standing by the cars in the background, waiting.

We took Caroline along with us for the ride.  She had fun. Can you tell from the photo? ;-)

 Other family came to meet us at the park.  Nick and Kaylee below.

 We stopped in at another relative's to go over some old photos.  This is Ann, a cousin of John's.

In June we made a quick trip to SOCAL to play with Damian and Tandy's family AND to attend his graduation from Navy Medical Residency.  It was so cold down in Balboa Park!  We froze. But not as badly as we froze at Braeden's All Star Game on Wednesday night.

That little 8 year old is quite the slugger and it was so fun to see him in action.  They happened to lose that game, but the score ended up being 25 to 24!  They had been way behind and really rallied there at the end.  But the ball park!!  YOWZA!  It's June in Southern California and we needed hot cocoa, jackets, blankets, hoods.  And we still came home fairly frozen.




We got in late on Tuesday night.  Wednesday we spent some time at the pool, Mike, Eric and I.  Tandy had a bazillion errands to run, and her final piano lesson to teach. 

Thursday morning was the graduation in Balboa Park in San Diego.  It started fairly early, we had to deal with traffic on freeways, parking, etc.  But first we had to have CAR KEYS!  Yikes.  Damian had to be there early for a run-though and took Eric and Lexi to help save seats (which ended up being very unnecessary), and the keys for Tandy's van -- the only set of working keys-- ended up in Damian's pocket and we didn't know it until he was practically there.  Argh.  So we 6 piled into our 5 seatbelt little car and took off!  Good thing they started late.  Very late.  We'd seen the entire program all printed out. Script, actually.  Word for word.  And they started late and ended early.  Pretty nice, eh?  We thought so. 
Great seats.  Great Navy band.  Good speech. Good-looking Navy Lieutenant.

 We could see him from where we were sitting.  He's sitting on the front row, looking toward camera.

 Our seats were right in front of the band.  We felt like we were at a concert rather than a graduation.

 And the organ pavillion at Balboa Park was quite spectacular.

 Bundle up in those blankies!  Damian and I both believed that it would be roasting and hot and sunny for HOURS in the San Diego sun.  Not.  Tandy called it.  She didn't think the morning marine layer would have been burned off by then, and she was right.  I thought we were bringing the blankets to sit on for padding. 

 It was so breezy that these state flags surrounding the pavillion kept blowing down.  That kept soldiers hopping..  Damian is in the line up, just to the right of the navy blue flag in center.  Don't even know what state it is.  Do you?

Ella kept busy taking some great photos.  Maybe we'll see some of them on Tandy's blog.  I stood up to take a photo of Damian walking across the stage to receive his diploma and my camera battery was dead.  Blurg.  But Tandy's wasn't, and neither was Ella's.

We ate out after and then headed home to Cedar.  A thousand miles in less than three days. My b___t's tired.  And we do it again tomorrow!!!

For Nick's graduation in Salt Lake City on the 8th.  PharmD.  Yay for Nick and Damian, our newest graduations.