the family

oh my goodness! i just realized how many things i am so involved in. i won't mention them all because i don't want too. but it's eating away my minutes left and right. it's crazy. i feel bad catching up on sleep in seminary. haha, not really. . . ok well really. but bro.hamilton hopefully doesn't mind too much. haha. i had an awesome adventure in seminary today.
we are rewinding my life right here:
a long time ago, one time during family home evening my family and i were singing "Families Can Be Together Forever". being in the family i'm in, we tend to get a little crazy singing our opening song. but this one takes the cake. in part of the song where it sings ". . . and the lord can show me how i can. . .", my brother and i (one of us, i can't remember) added a quick background vocal repeating "how i can" following that phrase. now that sounds confusing. but it's one of my favorite family memories. . . ever.
we are fast-forwarding my life right here:
so in seminary we sang famlies can be together forever and when it came to the part, i started busting up laughing and couldn't stop for a couple minutes. thank goodness i can be a quiet laugher sometimes. it was very enjoyable! so i texted all my family and told them. dallan told me i should sing the background vocals and erin told me it gets her everytime. same here, i won't be able to not think of my family when singing that song. not because we will be together forever but because of that stupid part we made up. kind of sad, but it makes me smile.
i love family memories, i remember one time we all had to day off and we, as a family played football for the first time. if you know my family, football is not neccisarily our 'thing'.
we traveled to boise and had a picnic, and did shopping and all that good family outing stuff. usually our family trips end up into some what of a fight, and the best part of this outing was that that didn't happen. i'll remember that day for many moons. hahahaha. but really, it was awesome. the morning before erin's wedding day we also had our very last family thing. ha. we went out to breakfast in my car (i drive i van, my teen dream machine), and had a blast of course. don't remember much fighting, so i suppose thats a good thing. it seems as tho our family is finally getting old. no offense to my lovely parents. erin's off, dallan will soon be off, and soon i am out of high school. i mean, aren't these all signs of a growing family? things like this make me appreciate my siblings more than anything in the world and help me realize more that they are some of my best friends. i'm known for being sappy so just bear with me. haha, i even just got teary watching dallan graduate. haha, i'm so cynical and such a pain with my family, but yet i still get sappy. i know, weird. but whatev.
thats a picture when we still lived in our silly duplex, which is like a house, except split in half. haha, between an apartment and a house i guess. thats the backyard we also had the power-ranger pinata in. that was fun. we don't have any really recent shots of us as a family except for the wedding pictures. i always wondered which ways our family would go, and now i am getting a pretty clear picture. being in the middle i kinda get a nice seat to just see both ends of the kids and where they are going. i don't know what i am going to do when i don't see dallan for four years, thats going to be hard. but most definitly worth it.
i remind you that these pictures are not recent whatsoever, so just don't look at my hair. hahaha. i'm just so happy that i was raised in a family where we were taught to find joy in eachother and not things. it makes life so much easier especially knowing you will have them forever, where things don't always last all too long. i'm glad i was raised in a family where when we were young, we were forced to hug one another if we got in a fight. ha! i'm glad i was raised i was raised in a family where my parents didn't care what they looked like, as long as they were raising us right. i'm also glad i was raised in a family where we were forced to eat dinner, even if we dont like it, because now i like mushrooms, aspargus, green curry, etc. haha!