dinner with the Crofts and Lydia’s board game

On Sunday I thought I was supposed to teach the lesson on the awesome talk, “Seventy times Seven” by Elder Robbins. I asked my friend, Betsy Croft, to come and share her thoughts on failure with the class. She is a potter, and during our dinner a couple weeks ago she had spontaneously started talking about how she has embraced failure because of her medium of expression and how everything often goes wrong in pottery. So I thought she would offer a really interesting angle on the lesson.

When we got to class, I was horrified to learn someone else was supposed to teach the lesson. There had been a mix-up in teaching schedules. Normally I would have gladly let her teach, but Betsy had driven all the way to the ward, had brought her pottery, and had already set up to teach. So I kind of told the presidency I needed to teach. They were all so nice, and so was the other teacher, Stephanie McAllister. She was absolutely the kindest person about the whole mix-up and let me teach.

The lesson went amazingly well, and Betsy added so much depth to the lesson.

After the lesson, we walked home in the hot sunshine with all of the kids. Abe and I wondered why we don’t walk to church more often. It is such a nice community exercise. Everyone waves as they drive past and it is a very fun and social activity.

When we got home, we released Clarissa’s birthday balloons into the sky. We think this is a good tradition going forward–releasing the balloons the day after the birthday.

Then we had the Crofts over to dinner for Thai grilled chicken and veggies. They brought amazing mango sticky rice that Micah learned how to make on his mission. We had a wonderful visit.

Then for FHE we played a board game Lydia created in the morning. Abe took some great pictures of it and all of the tiny pieces she made.

These pieces are so little–about an inch high. Aren’t they amazing? Isn’t Lydia amzing?!