Finally time for Disneyland

When we first got there we decided to get a few autographs. This is always a touchy activity, because you can stand in line for your turn and if the people in front of you take to long the characters might just up and walk away. (they are on a tight schedule and time frame) It's very hard to explain to the little ones.

So here we are with Alice, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts

Next we went on the rocket ships.

Someone in line offered to take a picture for us so I could be in it too, yeah . . .

Here's Wade and Jenn, for probably his first ride in the rocket.

Funny, funny Pattie-pie!

Jenny already posted about this funny story on her facebook page but I wanted to share it too.

The other day I as with Jenny and her kids and she had a lot of errands to run. In between those errands we had a little down time before we needed to get Wade to speech. We were close to the OC fair grounds and re-counting the sad fact that we had missed it again this year, we were all just too busy. They have a little farm there that is open to the public for free. So we decided to go and see if it was open. It was and we went in. There were lambs, chickens, rabbits, brand new baby calves and cows and goats and mama and baby pigs. When we were by the goat pens Payton and Wade wanted to touch the noses that the goats were poking out through the spaces in the fence, probably only 4 or 5 inch spaces. If the goat tried to get his head through the space straight on it would be impossible but one wise goat with horns twisted his head to the side and maneuvered his head horns and all, through the space. Then he proceeded to stretch his neck out and sniff the little ones. Kylie freaked out, but Payton and Wade petted him a little. We were worried that the goat would be stuck now, but no, he just twisted his head again and got back into the pen the way he was supposed to be. We got a real kick out of that smart goat.

Now here's the funny part. At least 30 minutes later I heard Payton kinda talking to her self and saying, "If that goat was a real boy, I would marry him!" I said, "Payton, why would you marry him?" She said, "because he is so smart!"

Smart is a very important quality for a prospective husband!!!

Fun day at the Splash Pad in Westminster, Thanks Jenny!

First of all Dane was my photographer. He's so good at it, but consequently no pictures of him and Wes is spending his birthday at Disneyland with his dad.....

Kylie had a summer basketball camp ball game today at Siglar Park. This has been a sketchy park in a sad neighborhood in the past. But lately the area is really been cleaned up and new homes have been built. The park has this really great new water park that is free. The kids always want to go there so when Jenny had to take Kylie there for her ball game she extended the invitation for a group gathering at the "Splash Pad" I was just going to the park mostly to watch Kylie play ball.

I met her there for Kylie's game and first we were joined by Vauri and her cute kids. When the game was over, we walked over to the Splash Pad. We stacked out a shady spot and I looked into the parking lot and Brandi and her kids were getting out of their car to join us.

I've taken Ema and Dane to this park once or twice when they have been spending the day with me and they always want to go again, and take the little girls. Brandi's only recollection of the park is the bad neighborhood, and never wanted to go. So we were so surprised when they showed up. I think they had a fun time.

Cute Patie-pie
Ema is the best big sister, she doesn't let those little ones very far from her reach.

Waders, Ellie-smellie, and Paytie-pie

My sweet Emmy

Kylie and her all day sucker

Posing Ella

Happy grandma and Abby, my sweetie-pie, she always acts so excited to see me, it always makes my day!

Youth Conf. Cont.

I took pictures on Thursday but they are all oriented wrong to use here on my blog. We went to an ocean water lagoon in Carlsbad, down towards San Diego. That is the place that we had the most "fun". We rented two ski boats that came with a certified ski instructors/drivers, equipment for wake boarding, vests and gas, two sea doos and a big tube for pulling behind the boats. The kids really loved this day, most of them had not had the opportunity to do this kind of activity before and all want to become "River Rats" now!

We went back to the church for a big Pizza feast, and more volleyball and dodge ball and two more speakers. Once again the kids were so wiped out from all the sun, water fun & exertion but they were so respectful and attentive. We had a seminary teacher from our Stake and also the Stake Patriarch. There was something for everyone and I think they all heard something that will stick with them. Then back to the Davis's pool for one last dunk. At about 10p.m. we all gathered together and had a kneeling prayer, beginning our fast before our special day at the temple.

Our concluding day was spent at the LA temple. Two more Young Men joined us on this last day, they had been on vacation with their family. This brought our total to 31 youths. We needed 10 Priesthood holders for the temple, too. It was a large group that day. We got to do over 200 family file names for a family in our ward. The temple workers in the baptistery separated the names into batches of 20 and clipped them together. They handed the sets of names to the kids to hold while they waited for their turn in the font. They also told us to show the kids how to read the cards and see when and where the people were born, to look at the names and think about the individuals that they were going to baptized for. It was a very special experience. The kids really got a grasp of this being an individual ordinance for a real person. It was really effective. At one point I was standing by the bench where the kids were waiting to enter the font and Kenny and Paige said, "Sister Wilson look, what we found;" showing me their cards, "here's the father and his son, and Paige has 4 of his daughters!" They were really excited!

Tito's Tacos

Then we took them to a place called Tito's Tacos in Culver City, not far from the temple. This is a LA temple trip tradition of our ward. 150 tacos and 30 burritos later they were full and recuperated from fasting "all day!" Then we took them to the Pantages Theater in Hollywood to see "Fiddler on the Roof" which I loved. These kids saw "Wicked" last year and it's hard to top that one.

Then we took them all to their individual homes

for a good night's rest!

Westminster Ward Youth Conference 2009

We had a fantastic experience last week. It had taken so much planning and effort to arrange the meals, the drivers, the host homes, the activities that we were all worried about it actually coming to fruition as planned. We had 27 youths join us on Monday morning, for our first activity, a service project, at the dry pack cannery. They had taken orders from ward members for food storage items and collected the money, we filled the orders and returned to the church. Where we had a taco dinner and Family Home Evening, with two speakers. Then their favorite activity, Dodge ball!!! They are crazy kids, and with a 30 something Bishop they were in Heaven!!!

Tuesday we went to a water slide in Irvine, and got our first dose of H2O and sun.
Then a spaghetti dinner at the church and more volleyball, until 6p.m. when we headed to Angel Stadium for a baseball game.

By now we had two more join us so our number was 29 youths and about 10 leaders.

On Wednesday we had another service project at the beach, just picking up trash for about an hour then playing and lunch at the beach. Some of the kids aren't really into water sports all that much but they were pretty good sports. The kids were just loving the down time in between activities at the church gym. So back to the gym until the next activity, which was a guest speaker and bar-b-que at the Davis's house.

One of our most special guest speakers was Brother Chris Jones from Newport Beach. As a hobby he searches for and buys church historical artifacts. He has purchased two of the first 5000 original copies of the Book of Mormon, which were published in 1830. He has a tremendous knowledge of church history, a great testimony of Joseph Smith and of the miraculous events that lead up to the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. He brought his precious treasures to share with the kids and even let them handle them. (These books are worth at least 90 thousand dollars each)


When Brother Jones was testifying of the restoration of the gospel, of the wondrous and heroic acts of Joseph Smith and of the miraculous gift of the Book of Mormon the youth were all very attentive and reverent. As you can maybe see we were in between swimming events, first the beach all day, and before a back yard bar-b-que, and swim party. They were hot, tired and anxious to eat, but very interested. One young man said in his testimony on Sunday that this speaker and his testimony was his favorite part of the whole week, and we did some really fun stuff.

Our sweet Paige, excited to be photographed with the original copy. They all got a whole new appreciation of the Book of Mormon. As you can see it is a substantial book, in size, and only cost $1.75, the price was set by Moroni himself.

Hunter, being shown how to handle the book. All of the kids were very appreciative of Bro. Jones time. He stayed and had dinner with us and even hung out for another hour or so.

Here is a picture of the two original books and Kenny is holding a reproduction of the originals.

Wade Does Like Grandpa Gene After Aall

The other night we got to have some one-on-one time with Wade. The other three kids went to Fallon with Dorothy. Gene always says, "Wade really doesn't like me very much," but we have proof, that he really does.

It doesn't really look that Gene is all that into playing here but they had had a lot of fun running and chasing each other around.

I think Wade still has a lot more energy and it looks like he got he best of Grandpa.

Julie's Birthday

Tonight we celebrated Julie's birthday at Buca di Beppo, a really fun italian resturant where you order family style. We all went, minus the 3 older Stockard kids, who are in Fallon.

I asked our professional photographer, Kevin to take some pictures because he was at the end of the table by my purse with my camera in it. Sadly he only got a few good shots. I can't understand why, we're all so photogenic.

Her's the birthday girl with her complimentry birthday cake and candlabra with candles for blowing out. There's cute Wade at the end of the table, he really didn't like being that far away from the action.

Brandi and Dane, horsing around, imagine that, guess who won . . . Dane says that he won, because his mom quit. I wonder what his mom would say.

Aren't they all so cute?

This was the first picture Kevin took,

I just couldn't resist when they both wanted to sit on my lap.

Swimming fun

Today I had 6 of our 10 grandchildren together for a few hours and of course they wanted to swim. You can see that Ema and Dane have already spent a full week in the sun at their annul summer trip to Clearlake with the Romberg family. You can see that we aren't too worried about those two getting sun burned. But the poor Stockards got a pretty bad sun burn last week on one of the very first really sunny days, that they spent at the park. That caused getting into the pool this summer to get off to a slower start. We wait all winter for the few months that our pool gets a really good work out. We have so much fun and have some really good swimmers. On this day we only had Wade (2) who was a non-swimmer. We still need to keep careful eyes on Abby and Ella too, but they were home with their mommy today.

This is one of the only pictures that I got with Dane and Weston. They were all over the pool horsing around, and I guess I was mostly focusing on Wade. I need some more practice with my new camera.

Here's cute Payton who's 4 1/2, she can swim "just like Arial" really, she's a great swimmer, she's safe in any part of the pool.
Ema was really cute with Wade, he loves the pool so we really need to get him safe in it quickly.
Here he had jumped in from the side, gone under the water and up into Ema's waiting arms.
There's Kylie, she was hard to capture too. They don't hold very still when they're playing in the pool. Someone is always within arms length of Wade, right now!
There's Kylie and Payton just having fun in the sun in Grandma's pool.
Waders, hopefully before the end of the summer we will have him swimming on his own, that is between good swimmers, of course.
Ema (12) is growing up too quickly. Here's another picture of the boys, Wes (6 1/2) is closer to Ema and Dane (11) is further out. Boy those two could pass for brothers. Wes is catching up to Dane in size very quickly too.
Now for any of you who may be thinking, "they have 10 grand kids and have a pool in their back yard, man they are just asking for an accident!" We do have a fence that is normally around the pool making our backyard and home with a pool safe for our loved ones!!! It is removable, but it's normally up and keeping everyone safe!

My Own Lap Top

I'm so excited because I finally have my own lap top. Dustin and Julie are such computer techies, and they are always up-grading their systems, so they offered me one they no longer needed. They spent a lot of time fixing it all up for me with programs that they thought I would like and be comfortable with. As with anything new there's always a transition period. I have Gene's lap top all fixed up to my liking with my games and pictures and favorites. Much to his dismay, he's been so kind to share with me and let me play when he needed to work. But now I have my own and need to fix it up too. It will be a challenge but I'm sure I can do it.
Gee thanks you guys, you're the best, I love you both!

Thanks!

Yea, I have some followers.

Now I'll be a little more excited

to up date my blog more often!

That's exciting!