Wow...two Sundays in a row...

I am writing in the blog.........

Tosha sent me this photo of their Halloween costumes.  Niki didn't not want to be a photo that night.  They will be packing up their home on Tuesday and then flying to Seattle on the 18th.  It is a bitter- sweet time to leave Okinawa, but they (and us) are excited to have them so much closer to us.

We facetimed last Sunday and I took this screen shot of Cooper showing off his sitting up skills.  Thank heavens for facetime.

Scott had his tonsils out and also his deviated septum in his nose repaired on Tuesday.  Chantel had her tonsils removed a few months ago, so he knew a bit what to expect, but it has not been fun.  He said today he is slightly better but still miserable. (No pictures of Scott.)

Jessica and Elessia had some early 1-year old pictures of Zander taken and already are making arrangements for their Christmas pictures they want to take with the boys.

Elessia figured out how to make the balloon from a photo.  Those two are very crafty and clever.

Ben remains at the State Hospital.  This has been a good week as far as we know.  Communication hasn't been good for the last month with his team.  We visit each Monday when we drop off Jena and her friends at their apartment.  The last few months, Ben calls us with his request for dinner food and we grab it and eat dinner together.  Choices are somewhat limited around the area after so many weeks.  But he is getting very tired of hospital food which I can totally understand.

Jena is loving her life, both at home and in Provo.  This past week, she was able to attend a service project and dance on campus on Tuesday night and then on Wednesday they headed to the Provo Rec Center and did racquetball and rock climbing.

They were making blankets out of plastic bags.

Here are Hannah, Sara and Emily in their court....

 Amy and her aide and Jena were in the other court.  Jena said that it was fun.

 This was a free climbing wall that the girls got to try their skills on.

And that is the Hall update.  Gary and I are still marveling that we have adult children and six grandchildren.  We are not sure how that happened at all.

We share the following pictures with our Primary class and asked if they could guess who they were.  We had started the lesson talking about parents and children in a family so we thought they would get the idea and guess fairly quickly (we teach the 5 year olds.)  They guess that they were grandparents and then they guessed aunts and uncles....then great grandparents...which they are to different people.  Finally I asked, "How do you think they are related to us?"  Again grandparents was a guess, but they then figured out that they were our parents and then quickly connected the right set to each of us.

Eileen and Richard Giberson

Wayne and Holly Hall

The lesson was that we can show love to our parents by obeying them.  I think that obeying our parents has been good advice for both Gary and I.  We are so lucky to have good parents to teach and love us on this earth.

We also showed them our engagement picture (they first thought it was a picture of me with my brother--Gary had a lot of brown hair back then.)  And then we showed them a family picture and they immediately picked out Jena--she looks just the same just bigger and older, they said.  They didn't know about our older kids and asked us to tell them the names a couple of times.  Funny that none of them commented about you kids looking different from us.

Reviewing this post, I see that Jena (again) has more photos about her life.  I guess you other kids need to send me more photos!  :)