Tag Archives: Family

Family Life, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

A Gluten & Dairy Free Thanksgiving

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A couple of months ago, I realized that I was feeling sick after eating dairy or gluten. It was after a long trial and error to figure out why I was feeling so sick. I’m still in the process of getting a diagnose but at least a feel a little bit better being off dairy and gluten. This may be another auto-immune disorder to add to my great list of auto-immune disorders.

Last month, my gluten free friend and I went to the Gluten Free Expo. It was a lot of fun. Here are some pictures.

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So this Thanksgiving, my mother in law made me some gluten free stuffing… which is probably my favorite Thanksgiving dish. I’m super grateful because pretty much you can find anything in gluten free now-a-days… well… except for butter croissants. I’m still waiting for the day when I can eat those again. 🙂

I have a lot to be grateful for. My husband has been so kind during my journey of finding out what is wrong with me.

My kids are so funny. They make me laugh even on days when I don’t feel good. Being a parent makes you have to work even when you’re sick but it’s worth the sacrifice because of the joy I feel when I’m with my kids.

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I’m grateful for my parents who have taken care of me during all my childhood health problems and for the great doctors I have.

I’m super duper grateful for the atonement of Jesus Christ. I mess up everyday but I’m soooooo grateful that I can try again and pray so God can forgive me. Seriously, it’s the greatest feeling ever to feel forgiven. I’ve notice I’ve been getting better at accessing the blessings of the atonement. I can tell that it doesn’t take me as long to ask for forgiveness.

Thanksgiving really is a nice time to spend with my family and think about all the things I’m grateful for.

What are you grateful for today?

Family Life, FHE, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Happy Halloween!!

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Dallin was a racquetball player. Quentin was a dog. May Bo was a flight attendant. Micah was an airplane.

Happy Halloween 2014!!!

See our past Halloween Costumes here:

2013: Super Mario Family

2012: Nerdy Baby Costume

OH and we carved plan of salvation pumpkins for Family Home Evening this past Monday!!! 🙂

Yep it’s the Celestial Kingdom, Terrestrial Kingdom, Telestial Kingdom, and Outer Darkness…. haha!

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Family Life, Photography, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

New SmugMug Site

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Hey!

So I’ve been a little non-existent here but it’s because:

1) My computer broke (self explanatory)

2) I was distracted into getting a new blog design (do you like it?)

3) I’ve also been working on my new SmugMug site with my photography stuff.

New Smug Mug

I went on a 1.5 week of computer fast and then the computer miraculously turned on again when my husband decided to fix it. IDK what happened. I did spay it out with a duster can but that’s about it.

It’s been really nice to disconnect for a while. I’ve spent more time with my kids and my apartment is clean! The dishes and laundry is done too. It’s amazing how much time I waste online.

So we’ve just been preparing for General Conference weekend. We are so excited for that.

Quentin started crawling three days ago!!

Micah has been learning his phonics…. like “oo’s” and “a’s”

Dallin is still working hard at grad school. He just recently submitted a science publication… congrats to him!

Me… I’ve just been focusing on working out, eating healthy, cleaning the house, and getting in a better scripture study… you know… being a mom. I’ve lost 6 pounds since January! 10 more pounds to go to be back at pre-pregnancy weight.

Dallin was sick this week. Now both of the kids have been sick and have been throwing up like crazy… yuck.

Anyways… thanks for reading my rambles.

I want to thank everyone who has ever let me take their picture. I’ve been able to organize my portfolio better with the new SmugMug platform. You should check out my new photography site and give me feedback!

Here’s a slide show of some of my favorite pictures I’ve taken over the last few years.

Stay tune and I’ll add more to my blog and new SmugMug Site! 🙂

Family Life, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Classic Skating

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I grew up going to Classic Skating all the time! I remember in 6th grade when they took us on a field trip to Classic Skating and I was super excited. My mom encouraged me to learn how to roller blade at a very young age and I’ve always loved it! I didn’t realize that my son, who is only 2, would love roller skating!!!

Last week, we went to Classic Skating family activity planned by our ward’s elders quorum. We had a blast! It made me really happy to see that Micah loved being on wheels. 🙂 He went around the rink like 8 times!

They’ve remodeled the place a little since I’ve been there but they still do things like “wipe out”, “snowball”, “blackout” and “train”. It sure brings back old memories!

After a while, Micah insisted on rolling by himself.

Our little Quentin bear just had fun looking at the lights. During blackout it seemed like we were at a rave or something! LOL! No, we didn’t take babies to a rave. It was just Classic Skating.

One thing that has changed is that I didn’t know they allow little kids to bring in strider balance bikes. They also let us have strollers on the rink! LOL! Our family definitely rolls in style. And yep, we used our own converted single to double stroller.

In The Family Proclamation it says that “Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”

As, a family we definitely try to work hard to keep our house in order and keep up with our studies but we also play hard too! Going to classic skating sure was a lot of fun and it was a good family/ward bonding activity.

What kind of wholesome recreational activities does your family like to do?

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Who are you?

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Every person on this planet is a child of God.[1]  Each is a precious, son or daughter of a Heavenly Father. What does this mean?  Why do we care?  Well the succint answer is that this simple fact makes all the different in our day to day actions.

Who is God, our Heavenly Father? That is one of the most important questions to answer in this life (and can only truly be answered by praying to Him).  But I will give a short synopsis of who I know He is, and why that makes a significant difference in my life.

Heavenly Father is a loving, perfect, just, merciful Father.  Much as a goodly Father listens to his small children, talks to them, helps them understand their world, and guides them, our Heavenly Father does to us in our world.As a small child is in his Father’s care, so are we. Our Heavenly Father “wants to communicate with us, and we can communicate with Him through sincere prayer.”

Because each of us is the child of a perfect, omniscient, loving  Heavenly Father, each of us has divine potential to become like Him.  We may, through faith in the Savior Jesus Christ, repent, and be baptised, and be changed into a better person everyday, en route to eventually attaining perfection. This is our Fathers goal, so see each us reach perfection. And I know it is possible!

One of the best ways for us to learn how to be perfect is in our families.  Heavenly Father made it so that children are naturally born only into families with a mother and father, so that we could prepare to become a perfect Parent as He is and return to live with Him one day. Even though sometimes our earthly father or mother is missing from our lives, He is still our Heavenly Father and is constantly there providing for us, listening to our cries, and helping us.

But as is all good stories, their is an evil character as well as the good.  Satan, the great master of lies, is concurrently trying to bring us down to destruction, and cause us to fail in reaching perfection.  He knows that if he can trick us, he can destroy our happiness, and thus is constantly seeking to tear down, destroy, confuse, and hinder all that is good.  His primary focus is to destroy families, and cause disbelief in Jesus Christ, because that is the center of our happiness and salvation. [2]

Thus comes to one of the greatest and most important gifts given to every single person… the power to choose.  Because God knows we cannot become like Him without choosing to do so, He has made us  free to choose good or evil.  To choose if we will seek for God, or follow Satan.  There are no other alternatives, although it may appear so.  Eventually all have to make the choice whether they will believe in God, or not, and thus follow Satan.  But the freedom to choose is ours, and remains ours as long as we do good. [3]_MG_8987

There will be temptations and persuasions from both sides, as we can see throughout life.  The powers of good and evil are in constant struggle. But we can choose to follow the Good,  to believe in our Heavenly Father, to follow His commandments and eventually one day return to our Father in Heaven.  He has given us a guiding roadmap, through the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the living Prophets today.  He has not abandoned us and loves us more deeply than we can imagine.

Even if we follow the good there will be problems and trials.  Our loving Father gave us the freedom to choose, and with that freedom we will make mistakes. Just as a good father lets his child have the freedom to ride a bike, he also must allow us the possibility of falling over and scraping our knee, otherwise we would not be able to learn.  Sometimes we have problems just because we live in a mortal world where sickness, disease, disasters and other things happen.  But the truth is if we follow Heavenly Father’s plan, and believe in Jesus Christ we can return and live with God one day, in spite of all the problems and trials of this mortal test.  And I’m sure it will be a sweet family reunion for all, if we have chosen to believe in and follow our perfect, loving Father in Heaven.

-Dallin

1. We are Children of God https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1998/10/we-are-children-of-god?lang=eng.

2. The Family Proclamation http://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation

3. Book of Mormon; 2 Nephi 2:27 “Wherefore, men are afree according to the bflesh; and callthings are dgiven them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to echoose fliberty and eternal glife, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be hmiserable like unto himself.”

Our Wedding, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Marriage: 1 man, 1 women

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I woke up with my email, news feeds, Facebook, and WordPress swarmed with  the news about “A federal judge Friday struck down Utah’s voter-approved constitutional amendment — which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.” [Deseret News]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has already put up an official statement on Court Ruling Regarding Same-Sex Marriage in Utah. It is short and simple.

The Church has been consistent in its support of traditional marriage while teaching that all people should be treated with respect. This ruling by a district court will work its way through the judicial process. We continue to believe that voters in Utah did the right thing by providing clear direction in the state constitution that marriage should be between a man and a woman and we are hopeful that this view will be validated by a higher court.

Emmanuel Knowles’ Blog is what motivated me to re-blog. I’ve already blog about this issue before here.

This fight will continue but we must not give up hope, our beliefs or faith. Satan wants us to get discourage and give up; but the prophets have already declared that “voters in Utah did the right thing”. We can’t give up now. We may not win in the higher courts but I know that Jesus Christ is the ultimate judge. We will all have to stand before Jesus Christ one day and testify to Him that we’ve done the best we can to to defend His laws.

There is hope. If you’re struggling with same-gender attraction or any other temptations. God can help you. God loves you. God can bring you happiness and peace in your life. Pray to God, I know He will listen to you and He give you answers to your prayers.

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Here is an official website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about this issue:

Love One Another: A Discussion on Same-Sex Attraction

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Dallin and I have been married for 3.5 years. It’s been a lot of hard work but marriage and raising a family has been the most fulfilling thing we’ve done as a couple. In a short 3.5 years, we have gone through tough times and good times. Marriage has brought us lots of joy and happiness and we want to protect the gift of marriage for future generations. We believe that marriage between 1 man and 1 women is ordained of God.  [Family Proclamation to the World]

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Child #2: Quentin, Family, Family Life, Ireland, Photography, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Travel

Ireland Miracle #2

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Now that we’ve had some time to ponder about our time in Ireland. I’m going to do a series of stories about miracles that happened on our adventure in Ireland. We feel like our trip to Ireland was one big miracle made up of a bunch of small miracles. The first miracle I blogged about happened within hours of our arrival in Ireland. You can read it here.

This post is about one of the final miracles that happened in Ireland and I’ll fill in the rest later. I felt like it was a miracle to have little Quentin in Ireland. He has been our favorite and best souvenir. You can see his newborn pictures here.

We initially didn’t plan on having the baby in Ireland. We thought we would just fly home during my last month of pregnancy…. but Irish airlines wouldn’t let pregnant women fly internationally after 28 weeks. That was a problem. Dallin wasn’t finish with his research assignment in Ireland when I was 28 weeks pregnant so we decided to stay. We changed our airplane tickets to July 25 which is one month after the guess “birthday” of the new baby. We thought since my first baby was 2 weeks early that it wouldn’t be a problem to fly home on July 25. Well, things didn’t go as plan and the baby didn’t arrive until July 4th which is 9 days after my “due date”.

At first we didn’t realize how much paper work and processing time it was going to take to get the baby home to the USA:

  • First we needed to get an Irish birth certificate (processing time 4 to 6 weeks)
  • Then we needed to schedule an interview with the US embassy (booking 4 weeks in advance)
  • We needed to take the Irish birth certificate to the US embassy interview to get a US birth certificate abroad and a US passport (processing time 6 weeks)
  • Lastly, we had to wait for the passport to come in the mail

The total estimated time to get the baby’s passport was 10 weeks after birthday which would’ve put us to Sept 12th! We didn’t want to pay more money to change our flights and we really wanted to get back to Utah. So we prayed and I got a priesthood blessing. My husband and I both felt at peace that the Lord’s timing is always right.

We acted on faith after the baby finally arrived. We miraculous got an US embassy interview for July 11 (14 days before our flight date) but we still needed an Irish birth certificate. So we called and requested an emergency Irish birth certificate. The hospital faxed our information over to the government offices instead of waiting for the information to process in the system. We managed to get a copy of the baby’s Irish birth certificate on July 8th. We went to the interview and told the people at the US embassy that we want to fly on July 25 so they marked our application as “urgent” but they didn’t guarantee that it would happen by then. Our faith was indeed tested while we waited for the passport to arrive in the mail. I checked the mail everyday hoping that the passport have come.

I was in distress because we needed to change our flights at least 24 hours in advance! Well to make the story short, the passport arrived within 48 hours of our flight and we flew home on July 25th when our baby was shy of 3 weeks old.

Yep we made it home with a toddler and a newborn infant alive. How in the world did I just give birth and get on a plane to move our family across the ocean? I have no idea except that I felt the grace of God helping us every step of the way.

Well that’s it for now. We have many more miracles to post about!

Family Life, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Why I only support marriage between man and women

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I claim full responsibility for this post. These are my beliefs. I do not speak behalf of anyone else or any organization. 

Where do you draw the line between church and state? Was America founded by the hand of God and His laws? If so, what are His laws? Are there a universal defined morals that can not be changed? I’ve heard a lot of your beliefs and debates. Here is my beliefs (you don’t have to read if you don’t want to… it’s very religious and it most likely be different than yours):

I don’t believe this is an issue on equality rather an issue of is there a God? I believe there is a God and He has defined laws/morals. I believe that God’s laws will always be decided by God Himself and cannot be changed by majority vote or democracy. Just like I believe that God has said sex before marriage is immoral and adultery is immoral. I believe that a relationship between two same-genders is defined by God as immoral. I believe that by allowing same-gender marriage is similar to if we all voted in the right for us to run red lights, to steal or to murder. I believe that as a nation will have to face the consequences of what ever laws are put in place whether those consequences are good or bad. I believe that when we obey God’s laws we are blessed and when we don’t we eventually have to face negative consequences. It may seem unfair that God doesn’t want same-gender relationships but it’s may also seem unfair to people who want to have sex before marriage or people who want to have multiple partners or people who want to steal to get things for free. I believe that these acts all the equivalent in God’s eyes but the good news is that God has the power to help us overcome our temptations to sin. We can also repent for the mistakes we make. I also believe that it’s easier to avoid sins rather than repair sins.

I believe that ideally children should be born to a mother and a father who are married. Now, because the world is not perfect, I believe that the government should have laws that support traditional family values and help families that do not have both a mother and a father for the betterment of our society.

This is why I believe that marriage should only be between a man and a women. I believe that our government laws should uphold good moral principles that are established by God himself.

I also believe that God has given us a choice to choose for ourselves what to believe and how we want to live our lives. He can only give us guidelines. He can never force us to believe what He wants us to. I believe that God loves everyone and He will allow us to make choices for ourselves even if those choices are not aligned to His will.

So weather or not the supreme court decides on Prop 8 is now up to the supreme court. The voice of the people have already spoken and the issue is equally divided even within different religious congregations. I will accept what the supreme court chooses but I won’t change my beliefs. Everyone can and will continue to live their lives the way they want.

I believe the future is as bright as I can make it be. The best thing I can do is live by what I believe. Our society needs to work together to love, to vote and to compromise because all our individual choices will affect the future of our world.

It always brings me peace to know that no matter what happens God will be the final judge and everything will turn out the way He wants it to.

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If you want to know what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believes on this topic you can look on their website:

http://www.lds.org/topics/same-gender-attraction?lang=eng

http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/church-responds-to-same-sex-marriage-votes

http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/church-mormon-responds-to-human-rights-campaign-petition-same-sex-attraction

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Feel free to express your beliefs, opinions and comments. Please keep it nice and kind.

Ireland, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Travel

Dallin’s First Post

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Dear World…. This is my first blog post!  Hooray.   I wanted to write to my family and friends and tell them about my experience in Ireland.  It is amazing and fun, as well as trying. The castles, greenery, ancient cathedrals, and accents are neat. It’s much more expensive, and learning how to do things in another country can be a challenge. I can’t count how many times we’ve been lost already. But we’ve been able to get where we were planning to go thanks to broadband cellular internet and May Bo’s faithful navigating with a laptop and google maps  It has been a blessing in a lot of ways to come here. May Bo and I have a lot more time with each other. She doesn’t have school, callings or social outing to go too anymore. It’s been nice to be able to spend evenings together again. I feel like this part of Ireland has been a “best” (See Elder Oak’s talk on “Good Better, Best“)

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This week May Bo and I went to see Newgrange. It is a 5000 year old mound of rock built about 3200-2800 B.C. (older than the pyramids) that has a long narrow passage leading to the center of the mound. In the center there is a cross shaped area with 3 stone washrooms and a bunch of ancient carvings. Every Dec 18-23 during the winter solstice the rising sun shines directly through the entranceway down the long narrow passage and into the center chamber and illuminates the entire room! It is supposedly a spectacular event. You have to win a lottery to see it (100 slots/30,000 applicants). It is an amazing mound, estimated to have used 200,000 tonnes of rock just for the center chamber alone! There must have been some amazing engineering going on to make this monument. There is no consensus among experts about why this monument was built, but I can’t help but notice the similarities between such a monument and the LDS temples of today. The Salt Lake Temple must weigh a lot too. I’m sure it took a lot of work to build, similar to this ancient monument.  It would not surprise me that such edifices were raised for the same purpose the Saints raise temples today: to unify families and to worship the “God of the whole earth,” even Jesus Christ.

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