Sunday, February 9, 2014

Mastering our Influence

Mary and I got to got down to Master Your Influence with Kirk Duncan from 3keyelements.com this week.  We had a great time!
Dad was supposed to come with us, but he was not able to come because of work issues.  That was a bummer, but good in a way too, because he was able to take care of Peter and Libby instead of us having to rely on the goodness of friends.
The Wasatch Front was beautiful with the blue skies and snow-covered mountains.

One night we had the pleasure of going out to eat with Shawn & Janel, Camille, Lauren and Katie.  Jesse met up with us too!  So fun to be with them!  We got the first notice that Brianna and John are engaged!  YEAH!!  So happy for them!

Mary really soaked the class up - although you wouldn't be able to tell it from this picture!  Ha ha!  This is a classic SnapChat-like picture that she sends to Nicholas non-stop.  Mary really "gets it", which cannot be said for all 16 year olds.  All through the classes, any insight that I had, I knew I could share it with her, and she shared a lot of interesting things with me that I never would have thought of.  Now this is what I'm talking about!  As a mother - that is such a pay day!

The theme of the class was, "For things to get better, I must get better.  If things are going to change, I must change."  It focused on how to access the subconscious in order to make lasting changes.  One of the ways you know what is going on in your subconscious is by what your body language says, so we studied a lot about that.  Kirk Duncan gave us a lot of practical tools to change for the better!

One night we went to dinner at the Garden Restaurant at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building with Shauna, who was gracious enough to let us stay at her home.  Wow - that is such a treat!  I started to cry when I saw the beautiful view of the Temple from that location.
Mary also told me that she wanted to come to the Young Living Convention in June with me.  Wahoo!!  That made me so happy.  She said, "Am I now your favorite child?"  "Yes!", was my reply!  Ha ha.  J/K all you other five - but she did make me so happy to hear that she wanted to come.  We really did have a great time this weekend.  We were on the same page the whole time - let's go here and here and do this and that.  It was a lot of fun and a really great "connecting time" for us.
 
The last night we were there, Mary met up with some friends from Mountain Home, and they said they were going to a place serving Salvadorean Food.  "We are SO going there!", I told Mary, so we tagged along to eat some pupusas.  My friend Paula, who went down with us for the trip, was a good sport to come along with us.  It was very much a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but man the food was good! 
 
Anyone in Salt Lake, go check out Fernando's Café Guanaco and order the pupusa with shrimp.  It will definitely be a destination for our family every time we go to Salt Lake now!
The owner, José Leonel, was so delightful.  He is a member of our Church, and it turns out that he is from San Miguel, the city where Josh is at right now!  He served as Obispo (Bishop) of the Barrio Roosevelt for 9 years, and his mother still lives in that ward.  How cool is that?  I especially loved the purple button up shirt with the blue El Salvador soccer jersey underneath.  Classic!  It was also really fun to meet some new friends from Mountain Home and Saratoga Springs that were at the Roots Tech Conference.  Thanks for lettings us know about this great spot in SLC!

Then today we watched a video of the Temple Dedication in El Salvador.  I cried all the way through it.  I thought of how happy Josh will be to come home, and how painful for him it will be to miss the country, the food, the people he has come to love so much!  Ahh - it is so bittersweet to come home from a mission!

We traveled safely home this morning (thanks to Paula driving when I got tired), and found all well at home with Dad, Libby and Peter.  Jesse came to Idaho for the weekend to go to the Imagine Dragons concert, which she said was amazing.  We must have passed her on the road, because she had already left when we got home (bummer!).

Funny story:  Jesse's roommate Talia slept in Libby's old room on the single bed.  Bruce came in early in the morning and said, "C'mon it's time to get up and milk."  He totally thought it was Jesse.  Talia, half asleep, said, "Oh, I'm kind of tired...".  Bruce was about to pounce on her and tease her into coming when it occurred to him that Jesse wouldn't be half so nice as that, and he stopped himself just in time and said, "Wait... who are you?"  Ha ha ha ha!  Oh my, talk about being traumatized by your roommate's Dad!!  Bruce said they had a good laugh about it later.

Peter went snowboarding again yesterday and had a fun day.  He gets to miss school on Thursday for a special tournament of the snowboard/ski team for the middle school.  He's looking forward to that!  Mary and I laughed right out loud at our class when Kirk told us that the body language meaning of sucking your thumb is that you have to pacify yourself by sucking your thumb  because you are not capable of getting up and doing something.  Well, if that doesn't fit Peter perfectly, I don't know who it would!  That was spot on!  He certainly loves to "go and do."

When I got home, Libby played an arrangement of the Simplified Hymn, "There is Sunshine in My Soul Today" for me.  It was beautiful.  I said, "What book did you play that from?"  She gave me the "duh Mom" look, and said,"It's my assignment from Jeff this week to arrange a hymn."  OK - she did it herself!  She worked on another today too.  LOVE IT!!




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