Bye MaeLynn

I'm interrupting my blog hiatus to bring you this news. I know some of you knew and/or knew of my friend/neighbor in Logan, MaeLynn. She passed away today, due to pancreatic cancer, after living about 9 months beyond what the Doctors thought. She leaves behind a husband, 5 kids and more friends than I ever knew one person could have. She was amazing.

Sounds like she went peacefully at home with all her family around her, which is what she wanted most of all. Details here

I also wanted to share this poem her husband wrote her last summer. She LOVED it, and it's quickly become one of my favorites as it will always remind me of her and the lessons I learned just by knowing her.

I'll be a while...

Got too much to do

I'll be a while...

Not as fast a learner as you...

I'll be a while...

Have your children to raise

I'll be a while...

I'm still seeking your praise

I'll be a while...

Got my mountains to climb

I'll be a while...

Let me take my time

I'll be a while...

But always dreaming of you!"

Seriously?

What's up with Blogger? You leave the blogosphere for a month and when you try to come back you discover that loading and arranging photos got harder! I I get the error message "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not allowed: META" when I try to post something with nicely arranged photos and words. That train post took me about 30 minutes. Has anyone else noticed this? Or did I just forget how to post?

Grrrrr

So much for a post a day...

Train Folk. Portolia, CA

If I blogged in December I would have been excited to blog about this. Early December we joined some friends on a trip to Portolia CA to ride the Santa train. Portolia is a little railroad town that puts on this cool little event every year. People come to ride the train, sit on Santa's lap, eat delicious homemade cookies (made by town folk, including home economics students). It was so much fun. We took several rides on the train each time choosing a different train car or caboose. The fine folk even let Ari come in the engine and sit in the controllers seat (photo #4). Pretty sure it was a dream come true for Ari. I love the Portolians.

It's also important to note the photo of Ari and his new homies in the second photo down. These boys gave Ari his first nick name and bugged him about it so much it made him mad. Guess what it was. REI. Haahaha. That's how you know these boys have awesome parents, they have REI on the tip of their brains. We soon convinced Ari that it was a cool name. Now if he could just comprehend what they were doing when they bust out ninja moves and use Stars Wars jargon.