Ella’s Baptism

Friday, September 22, 2023

Last weekend we headed to Saint George to attend Ella’s baptism. It turned into a great weekend where we were able to see family members from four of our kids.

Piper and Ella have become good friends, so Justin decided to drive up from Arizona with Piper so they could join in the celebrations. At the last minute Ben decided to come as well with his kids. Sadly, Sharley was in Idaho to be with her family for a wedding.

Alex, Lisa and James drove down from Highland also.

And then of course, Lisa and I drove up from San Diego.

We got there fairly late, somewhere around 10:30 and I was promptly put to work installing three light fixtures for Alycia. As always, what should be a simple job, turned into a bit of a nightmare and took me more than an hour.

Ben and his carload arrived around 11:00.

Saturday morning Justin and I decided to go for a run. As we headed out for what we thought would be a three mile run, we saw the new Red Cliffs temple in the distance.

To me it looked pretty close, less than a mile away so we decided to just head there and back. It wasn’t long before we realized that what we thought would be a short run, would be much longer than we had anticipated. In the end it was a four and a half mile run.

The baptism was at 10:10 which to me seemed like an odd time to have a meeting, but once we got there, I realized that this was no ordinary baptism, but a regular production.

Since it was a Stake Baptism in a fairly large stake, they apparantly had a lot of baptisms secheduled in order to keep it small and personal, they only had two kids baptised per session and they scheduled several sessions throughout the morning. Ella asked me if I would give a talk at her baptism.

After the baptism we all went to Alycia’s house and the kids played on an inflatable water slide and I ate much more that I should have.

At 5:10 we all had appointments to go to the St George Temple open house. The temple was amazing. I have only been to the St George Temple a couple of times so I don’t remember too well how it looked before the remodel, but it is sure beautiful now.   

You might notice in this picture that Princess Lisa is in a wheel chair. She is expecting a baby girl any day now and there was no way she could be on her feet for an hour let alone climb the hundreds of stairs that this temple has. It took some persuasion, but she rode in the chair and took elevators.

We were asked not to take any pictures inside the temple but apparantly Lisa managed to sneak a picture of this light fixture. During the remodel they found a few of these light fixtures in the basement. You can’t see the etching on the glass globe very well but it has a picture of cotton blossoms etched into the glass. They copied this light fixture and variations of it are found throughout the temple. It really is beautiful.

I do have to admit, however, that with seven adults and nine children it wasn’t the most reverent of temple tours I have been on.

We then all went back to Alycia’s, ate more food and then we attempted to put the kids to bed. The girls were great, but the boys were becoming a nightmare. They were fighting over who would sleep in what bed and finally, in exasperation we told them all to sleep on the floor in the family. The next thing we knew, the girls were out there sleeping with them. We turned on a movie and they were all asleep within minutes.

Sunday morning Ben, Justin and kids all headed south and Alex and family headed north and Lisa and I and Alycia’s family headed to church. Alycia also gave me another job to do. She wanted this beautiful mirror hung in this corner. It was a much easier job than hanging the lights the night before.

At one point on Sunday, mom and I decided that we wanted to go on another Temple Tour without all the kids, so we planned a visit Monday morning before we headed home. Alycia also mentioned to us that she was planning to go again without all the kids, so Monday morning we dropped her kids off at school and we all headed back for a second temple tour. We then said goodbye to Alycia, June and Holden and headed home.

--------------------trivia--------------------

The toy Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
Woody's full name is Woody Pride.

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