Monday, March 17

Downtime in Denver!

This post marks the longest I have ever gone between posts!

The weekend of March 8th and 9th was Brandon's basketball tournament in Montana. A few weeks before that I was talking to my mom telling her that I didn't know what I was going to do with myself while Brandon was going to be out of town, and she jokingly replied that I should go visit her. Well it just so happened that I kind of liked that idea, and looked around on the net for prices on tickets, and I found a Frontier plane ticket for $100! I grabbed that and did a hop, skip, and a jump over the mountains to spend time with my parents.

In the course of the weeks that preceded my flight to Denver, our family received some unexpected news. My grandpa that lives in Las Vegas had what we doctors thought was a mild heart attack, but it turned out to be something else. I can't even remember what the acronym means, but he was diagnosed with what is called COPD. It's a condition strongly associated with people who smoke for many years. My grandpa smoked from the age of 9 until he was in his late 50's or early 60's. Basically the damage he did to his lungs meant that ate the age he is now, his lungs are still taking in oxygen, but his body isn't using it the way it should be. So about a week or so before I flew to Denver, my mom and her brother were out in Vegas taking care of things with my grandpa. Talk about stress!

So I almost felt like I should cancel flying over because my mom was tired, and physically sick from all of her stress she had been dealing with, but she said she needed some laughs, and wanted me to still come for the week.

Let's just say that it was a really fun week. I fulfilled my role as the the comic relief that she so desperately needed, and it was a blast in the process. We did our shopping (a Voorhees women tradition), looked at their new house being built, went to the mountains, ate out a bunch, and just enjoyed one another's company. It was so good to see my parents!

I came back from Denver, and Brandon still had his head in the clouds because of the exciting news of his team winning the Western basketball conference for the Deaf! His team won the bid to go to Orlando to play against the team from the East that won. I am thrilled for him. And of course he has been nothing but humble about the entire thing. But his team worked hard, and they worked well together to be able to beat the other teams.

The day that I got back from Denver, we stuck around Salt Lake because our friend Amber was going through the temple. During the couple of hours of time that we had to kill, we went to temple square and looked around at the conference center for a bit, and in talking to the man who was our guide, we found out where the cemetery was where President Hinckley was buried. So we drove around until we found it, and found his grave, along with President Grant, President Mckay, and President Taylor's gravesites. It was so neat. The Spirit was so strong when we found all of them. We didn't have enough time to really search for other general authorities of the church but we hope to get back there some day soon so we can spend more time there. We truly felt that the areas where these wonderful leaders are buried are hallowed ground.

Other than that, we still plan on taking the rest of our foster care classes in April, because that is when the foster care foundation was able to provide interpreters. So we have had to put some of this stuff on hold. But we are moving forward with some of the paper work.

That's all for now, and that was the nutshell version!