April Birthdays

I have been very negligent about acknowledging my siblings with April birthdays. David's was the 5th and Susie Q (no longer Q, actually) had hers the 16th.

I'll start with David, since he's older and his birthday was first. David is my one and only big brother. At only a few years older than me, when we were growing up, we had an interesting love-hate relationship. Sometimes I idolized him, and sometimes I fought with him. Maybe I fought with him because he didn't (and who could?) live up to my idol standards. But time and prayers have worn away the scars and now I think he's a great man. Some of my favorite memories with David include some nice gifts he made for me at Christmas exchanges. One was a little wagon that I kept on my dresser until it fell into complete direpair, and the other was a doll's bed for a baby doll I coveted and got for Christmas maybe the same year, maybe the year before. I still have that bed, though it might be at my parents' house. Another fond memory would be driving to Greeley for some youth leadership meeting in his dinged up, old yellow truck. Greeley being about 20-30 miles away, across mostly bare open highway at that time (though there's been a lot built there since that time), we probably had the road pretty much to ourselves so he showed off for me by taking the truck faster than the speedometer could record. Probably not the best thing to be doing on our way to a Church thing, but I enjoyed laughing with him.

Now, he's a mature father of two baby girls and fathering two of his wife's children--all of them adorable. He loves hunting and fishing and pampering his dog, and weren't we surprised when he first told us about Sariah, shortly after they met, that she loves hunting too! It was a match made in heaven.

Now for Susie Q. She's kind of my middle child. I mean, not really, but since I'm third and she's 6th, she's in the middle of the five children younger than me. While I was growing up, she was just a kid, so I had fun babysitting her and passing on my hand-me-downs to her. But before too long, she seemed to catch up to me and we even worked at the same place for awhile, her just after high school, and me just after college. She was actually the one who got me the job, even, at Kids' Harbor. After that, she moved to Provo to go to college and a year or so after that, I returned to Provo, too, for a graduate program that I didn't finish, so we were adults there and hung out sometimes. We had some good memories there, making sock monkeys Mom gave us kits for so we could do something together, and she was good about remembering the holidays and giving me cute gifts.

After awhile there together, I moved out East, but she stayed there and got to know Mike, got married and now they're the proud parents of three cute little girls with a fourth on the way. But not only do they have children to tend, they're also now helping Mike's parents with some sheep farming! I love hearing about their adventures with the sheep and little girls on the farm on our myfamily site.

So, although I'm a little bit late, I hope you both had wonderful birthdays!
(Pictures coming soon)