Mel's Fantastical Insights

I teach Gospel Doctrine, or basically a bible study class at my church. It is one of my favorite things to do. This week I went a little insane and ended up doing a lot of prep work and just wanted to share it. We always run out of time to study the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, because it comes at the end, and always around Christmas time and everyone does Christmas lessons instead. This year I decided to battle the beast (pun intended) and taught a crash course in Revelation in 35 minutes or less. Obviously I had way more than material than we got to go through. Half of these handouts came from BYU Studies website, which is an amazing source of information if you are looking at a deeper view of your scripture reading. Another help was the Ensign come follow me article this month by Nicholas Frederick. Handouts There's a lot more info that's in my class notes if you would like that as well. Class Notes

My sister and her family came all the way from Idaho to visit us. Naturally we had to take them to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a typical July day, foggy, freezing, windy and crowded. We battled people on bikes and with strollers and the wind to walk onto the bridge. We had just made it to the first tower when we noticed a whale watching tour boat and joked about how cool it would be if there was suddenly a whale that came out of the water. About ten seconds later, A WHALE CAME OUT OF THE WATER! It didn't ever do the complete National Geographic flip over or show it's tail, but there was a Humpback Whale feeding, and it kept coming up to eat. It was amazing. AMAZING. We spent almost 40 minutes watching the whale, possibly whales at the time. There was one in particular that came over, right below us the kids could all see it, and it was so close we could see the barnacles on the mouth, and it rolled and was putting on quite the show for us. It was an amazing sigh...

I used to love Sundays. I was raised Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and we Mormons go to church for three hours every Sunday. It has never been a chore to me, I have always enjoyed it. My children on the other hand, don't love it, and every Sunday there is an epic battle in my home to get dressed for church. Half of them don't want to go and try to finagle their way out of attending, the other half don't mind going but hate wearing anything but active wear. Needless to say I have to now gear up for Sundays. Today was different, and all because of one child. This child. Alice got dressed today 25 minutes before our normal getting dressed time, without me asking, without me pleading, without me begging and bargaining, and because she got dressed Esther got dressed, and then Daniel and Charlie was the only one who tried to finagle staying home (which is his normal and always has been) yet he chose to wear a vest with his shirt and ...

I'm sure I have blogged about all my sisters getting married, but lately the last one of us were married and here are some of my favorite pictures from the party. Happy Wedding Day Britt! All the kids loved the swings at Grandma's house. They also loved running in circles and eating all the things that looked like chocolate. At the end of a very long day, we remembered to snap a picture of Jason and I.

One of the things we all hope to find as genealogists is personal histories. Wouldn't it be fantastic if everyone could have written even a paragraph about themselves and it aaas preserved and findable? Unfortunately this is not the case. This is actually the reason I began looking into my ancestors about a year ago. I was determined after getting a BA in research aka history, that I could find more information than what we currently had available. I was right in my impulse. Our greatest source has been the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. They have been collecting histories on the pioneers for a very long time, and luckily I have a lot of pioneer ancestors. My first stop at their archives revealed a lot of treasures but one of my favorites has been the personal history written by Mariah Taysom. Mariah Jaynes lived on the border of Wales and England in the Monmouth area. She met a Mormon missionary by the name of Charles Taysom and became converted to the Church of Jesu...

Today's blog prompt for the Fearless Females was asking about a favorite recipe, or a recipe handed down through generations. I don't know if there are recipes that have made it through the years (mostly I come from a long line of recipe embellishers and non written recipes), but I would like to talk a little bit about the kitchen. My grandmother is remembered as always making something for somebody and always wearing her apron. Everyone I have talked to has said that Vonnie was the best cook. My mom says she never remembers Grandma cooking anything fancy but that everything tasted fantastic. Except for the liver and onions that she was fond of. One of the things that she made that she was definitely remembered for was her candy making. Grandma would make divinity for the holidays and piano recitals and a few other occasions. Apparently her divinity was famous because the few who have mentioned it to me get that look on their face like they are remembering the best thi...

I am combining the prompts from the 4th and 5th. They ask if you have marriage certificates and then stories about how the people met and later became married. I have found a few citations of marriage records but have seen very few, while I am grateful for the indexers who put the information out there I can't wait until they get around to attaching images. Although I guess I can always pay for the actual documents but who wants to do that? Regardless, this is one of my favorite stories. My grandma, LaVon Taysom, was the oldest of a lot of kids. When she was a teenager her parents sent her and two of her sisters to live with their grandparents (Hammers) in Pleasant View, UT. While there, they would attend the local dances and she eventually met Marshall Maycock. Now being proper, as they dated, her sisters went with them as chaperones. Eventually LaVon and Marshall decided to get married. She was only 17 so on their marriage certificate her birthday says 10 Jul 1908!! ...

Yesterday's blog prompt on women's family history is to tell if you are named for some ancestor in your family. You can tell how awesome I am at keeping up with these. I am not named for an ancestor, but my daughter is. Ask my son and he will tell you the story of his name, how there are many many Daniel's and Daniels on our family tree. He had me print out a family tree so he could circle them all. While he was doing that he ran to his sister and showed her all the Alice's that he could find. In my 8 generations there are about 5. Obviously that's give or take since I am not going to count sisters, daughters that I am unaware of, etc. But Alice is definitely a family name. Alice was destined to be Ruby. I met Ruby and David Haight at a missionary homecoming in Burley, ID many years ago. Since I met them I have loved the name Ruby. While Alice was being bathed and monitored my husband decided that Ruby should not be her name, we decided on Alice. Danie...

March is such a great time. One of the things I have found in my many "Pinteresting" moments was a blog that had a bunch of writing prompts on female ancestors during the Month of March which is Women's History Month. Woohoo! So I am already behind, always, but I will answer a few of the prompts since I find them interesting. For March 1st, the prompt was do you have a favorite female ancestor? I have always had a hard time narrowing down my favorite of anything. I can't ever decide on a favorite song, or hymn or artist or author. I love so many things! It is obviously impossible for me to pick my favorite female ancestor but I will restrain myself and choose just a few to reminisce about. First of all one of my favorites is Mary Humphries/Humphris/Humphreys. I have already blogged about her but she has always been an inspiration to me after knowing that her family traveled in the Willie Handcart Company. Mary came from England, settled in Pleasant View,...

Christmas time again! I can't believe it. I have truly become horrible at blogging. I admit total defeat. I am glad that blogger still lets me have a blog despite all my inconstancies here. Anyway, this holiday season started like all the others and still has caught me by surprise. Let me explain my newly found hesitancy with Christmas time. Many of you (although I doubt anyone reads this anymore), are aware that Jason has had a lot of health problems the last few years. For the last 2 Christmas and Holiday seasons I have basically been a single parent. Jason has been a great sport and participated in like 3 activities each year, but they have been severely limited with his constantly being on a riding scooter. Plus we always tend to be sick on Christmas. 2 years ago when I was pregnant with Charlie we didn't start our celebration until almost noon because my kids were so sick. They opened their stockings laying in my bed and it was the saddest thing I have ever se...

It being Pioneer Day I figured I might as well share with my viewers (all 2 of you) the real reason I don't blog much anymore. It is family history. I spend so much of my very limited computer time researching dead and forgotten ancestors that I have let it take up almost all of my spare time. A lot of my spare time has also been traveling around Utah to meet with cousins, very distant cousins, grandparents, cemeteries and libraries and old pioneer places trying to track down as much info as I can. My children are tired of our family history trips but they still manage to drudge along with me. I figure they will look back and laugh about it one day. Pioneer Day makes me think of all my wonderful pioneer ancestors. My favorite pioneers are my Great great grandfather Amos Maycock and his wife Mary Huphris (Humphreys, Humphries, Humphrys, or any other way you can think to spell it). So here is a shortened story of their journeys. Amos started his journey in England. He was ...

My family goes to Yellowstone every other year. I love going. I love almost everything about Yellowstone, the animals, the geological features, staying in the cabins, and of course watching my kids have a good time. Here are a few of the highlights of our trip. As many of you know, Jason has been having a hard time walking for about 3 years. While super annoying to him, it also has been hard on the kids. Most notably Alice. We pulled up to our first hike, the Norris Paint Pots and Alice proceeded to cry for about 20 minutes because she was too tired to walk. About the time she started being ok about walking (and after about 20 people on the trail tried to help us with her), Charlie ripped off his shoes and threw them into the hot springs. I was able to grab one but the other shoe was no where to be seen. I was mortified, not that I had a horrible child, but because I was so afraid Charlie's shoe was going to ruin the hot springs. Kids. Here is us at Lower Falls or ma...

I apologize ahead of time, some of the pictures are sideways, yes, I know. I am sure that I could reopen them in some other program to fix them all but then I probably wouldn't have time to actually post. So I figure you can all deal with it. I decided that for once I was not going to just sit around and wish my house was clean and wish that the kids made it easy for me to go somewhere with them. So instead we rested on Monday and then on Tuesday we set out to go to the Discovery Gateway. We were getting dressed and I was putting the last of the laundry away when we heard screaming. Yep Charlie needed stitches. So off to the Doctor we went and he ended up with 2 stitches in his head. Go Charlie! He is definitely "that kid." Needless to say that put us a day behind in the plans. On Wednesday we went to the Thanksgiving Point Farm. Charlie thought all the animals were there for him. I was so worried he would fall and smash his head but he didn't. He lov...

I obviously have not been very good at blogging since Charlie has been born. I am a busy mom of 3 with a husband who has a fairly demanding job, so I am just claiming the obvious of at the end of the day I would much rather be asleep than on the computer. Charlie just turned 1 year old. This is him moving boxes at Grandma's house so that he can slide down the stairs. Around here we call Charlie the "book murderer." Charlie can take board books and within a few minutes rip it apart. Charlie is also very skilled at screaming and attacking the kids. Hilarious! But to this day the funniest thing I have seen him do was "car jack" Daniel. We have one of the little tikes red and yellow cars and Daniel was riding in it, Charlie chased him down, opened the door and grabbed Daniel by the sleeve and ripped him out of the car. Then he got in and yelled at Daniel until Daniel started pushing him. I laughed so hard, and have tried so many times to get Charlie ...

I don't know about you guys but man we have a lot of snow! Merry Christmas to us! Last year we barely got enough snow to cover the yard in a light dusting a few times, this year, well let's just say I am grateful for my neighbors who come to shovel my driveway. This is Charlie's first real time in the snow, literally, I put his snow pants on and stuck him in it. He is not a fan. Regardless, we have had a super crazy year, which I guess all people with 3 or more kids can say. In the last 13 months we have had 2 ankle surgeries, a new baby, a new nephew who came with his own special issues, a neice, another pregnant sister, a mission call for another sister, and a mom and dad who seem to now live in Utah. And that's only on my side of the family! Thus blogging has fallen way behind on my priority list. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and has a Happy New Year.

I constantly think about posting on my blog. My kids are so cute and funny. We constantly are going places and seeing amazing things. My husband and I are overly opinionated and boy could I write about any political issue or person if I really felt like it. Most of all, I feel like my mind is always in constant narration. Regardless of all the reasons why I should write more, there is one big reason why I do not. Don't get me wrong, Charlie is awesome but come on! He is not even 6 months old and he sits up, crawls, fusses because he can't get to Daniel and Alice fast enough, refuses to eat cereal or any other baby food, won't drink from a bottle, already has one tooth and most of the time hates Jason. Now sure, him not being on a set schedule is my fault, as I never live life in any sort of organized way. (I do try it just never works out.) But Charlie often drives me crazy. Then when he isn't driving me crazy these two are: Oh well right? It sure is an ...

Way back in April it was Alice's turn to have a birthday. She is adorable. She of course wanted a butterfly birthday and the hunt for butterfly things began! Luckily Target had butterfly party stuff (score!) and ROSS had a few butterfly random things that little girls would like. So it was fairly successful. For her party I found in Women's Day a butterfly cupcake recipe from Bakerella. I figured I could certainly get those done, apparently I learned nothing from Daniel's birthday. Now we didn't want to go through the whole shabang of party but we realized that Alice has never had a true birthday party so we invited some friends and cousins over and she had a "real birthday" according to Daniel. When the kids arrived at her unofficial party, the cupcakes were made, not frosted and the wings for the butterflies were being assembled. It was a step above the needing my sisters to frost things like at Daniel's party so I call it a success! While the ...