1 Year!!!

We celebrated our first anniversary by going to see Brigham Young’s Winter House and Jacob Hamblin’s house.  Then went out for dinner.  It was kind of fun symmetry because the houses were decorated for Christmas, and last year on our honeymoon we saw Biltmore Estate all decorated for Christmas.

We learned that all the wood, and even this "marble" are actually hard wood,
painted to look like the type of wood or marble that they wanted it to look like.

The owner of this trunk wanted the rounded top so nothing
would be set on top of it and she would always have access
to its contents.  Pretty smart!

This is the master bedroom, and they believe this is the original
color

Brigham Young had his portrait painted sitting in this chair.
The portrait is hanging in the front room.

Outside of Brigham Young's House

Outside Jacob Hamblin's House

Jacob Hamblin's saddle

Jacob Hamblin was a peacemaker to the Native American tribes.  He did a lot of travelling, and didn't really spend much time in this house.

It's strange to think we've been married a year.  It seems like forever, and it seems like just yesterday.  I love you so much Peter.  I'm so glad I chose a year ago to be sealed to you for time and all eternity in the Temple of the Lord.  Happy Anniversary!

Christmas 2013 Part 1

Seems like we’re all doing Christmas in stages, nowadays.  I must say, it certainly makes for a different Christmas, but it also makes it longer!  For the first part of Christmas this year, we went up North to be with Peter’s family.  Peter’s dad was really excited since all of his kids were in town for Christmas. 

We went up Friday, and Saturday was busy!  First, we had the Hill family party at 10am, which was actually pretty fun.  There is a lot of family on that side, but the house was big enough that everybody fit comfortably, and there was food and a service project.  There was also a little Christmas program in which we sang “Angels, We Have Heard On High,” as well as a white elephant gift exchange. 

Our nephew was a shepherd in the Christmas pageant

Then we went to visit a friend from Peter’s dad’s mission.  They had an old fashioned ice cream parlor in their basement, which was pretty cool!  Next, we went downtown to the City Creek Mall, had dinner, and looked at the lights on Temple Square.  We also saw a bunch of cool candy displays.

This view was just too pretty not to take a picture

This is one of Peter's favorite sections of lights on Temple Square

One of the cool Candy Displays

M's smile looking at the Candy Displays

City Creek Mall

Sunday, Peter and I sang in a quartet with Peter’s parents and with their ward choir for their Sacrament Meeting Christmas program, which was pretty fun.  Monday, Peter and I did a little Christmas shopping for each other and for Peter’s siblings.  We hadn’t had much chance before because of school and because Peter worked at noon most of the week after we got out of school.  We were finally able to do some shopping two days before Christmas…

Christmas Eve, Peter’s parents had a party at their house for Peter’s dad’s family at their house.  Their tradition is a talent show in which everyone participates.  Peter and I sang a song from Frozen!  It was fun. 

We took this picture and sent it to my parents over Google Hangouts

  Christmas morning, we slept in all the way until 8 and then got up to open our presents!  Yay!  We got lots of goodies, including some clothes, some movies, and other fun stuff! 

Our only picture of Christmas morning haha

Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow

This year, as I’ve remembered the Nativity Story, my thoughts have been drawn to the Shepherds, humble men who were blessed to witness marvels.  While they were watching their sheep in the fields, which I’m sure was an everyday experience, an angel appeared and spoke to them!  Can you imagine?  In the darkness, while they went about living their lives as they always did, a messenger from the Lord appeared to them.  And the message he gave to them!  That their Savior and Lord was being born only a short distance away and they, the lowly shepherds, could go see him.  They must have been humbled and overwhelmed by this marvelous invitation!

I love imagining the shepherds in the fields on that dark, starry night.  I love to imagine the wonder they must have experienced when the angel appeared to them and then when they saw “a multitude of the heavenly host”¹ singing praises to God on High!  One of my favorite Christmas songs by John Denver says, “And they sat there, and they marveled, and they knew they could not tell whether it were angels or the bright stars a-singing.”²

As I’ve thought about the shepherds, I’ve thought about what they can teach us.  They must have had faith, for Moroni teaches us “it is by faith that angels appear and minister unto men”³.  In the Christmas Devotional, Elder Ronald A. Rasband said this about the shepherds,

“On the hills of Judea surrounding Bethlehem, Luke tells us shepherds were abiding in their fields. These were not common shepherds but ‘just and holy men’ who would bear witness of the Christ child.”⁴

His description of the shepherds as “just and holy men” comes from Alma 13:26. 

“And it shall be made known unto just and holy men, by the mouth of angels, at the time of his coming, that the words of our fathers may be fulfilled...”⁵

I wonder if the shepherds knew they were written about in prophecies.   Somehow, I doubt it.  I think these men were not much different than you and me—individuals who quietly lived their lives in righteousness.  I like to think they were surprised and overwhelmed at the angel’s appearance unto them.  Perhaps they asked themselves, “Why us?  Why were we chosen to witness this holy event?  Were there not ones more worthy than us?”

 If we know of Christ, we understand why shepherds were chosen to view his birth.  Jesus declared, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.”⁶ The Lord often teaches through symbolism, and He began teaching us who He was from the very beginning of His life on earth by inviting shepherds to his birth. 
A story I read or heard one time about a shepherd's love has stuck with me.  It is from an address by Elder John R. Lasater of the First Quorum of the Seventy that was included in the May 1988 Ensign entitled, "Shepherds of Israel."

Although the song entitled “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow” encourages the shepherds to “leave your sheep and leave your lambs…leave your ewes and leave your rams,”⁷ I don’t for one second believe those shepherds left behind their sheep.  Much of the reason Christ compares Himself to shepherds is because shepherds love their sheep.  This love means the shepherds would never leave their sheep unprotected, even to see their God.  And Christ, the Lamb of God, would certainly not be offended to have sheep at his birth.

Much like Christ is both a Shepherd and a Lamb, we are both sheep in the Good Shepherd’s fold and assistant shepherds who help care for the other sheep and bring more sheep into the flock.  As follow the angel’s invitation to the shepherds to come unto Christ this Christmas season, I hope we can bring other sheep with us that we may all feel the love of the Good Shepherd.

               

Shepherds

by Teresa Bateman

There was no little drummer boy at Bethlehem that night.

The animals did not know how to talk.

The wise men didn’t make it on time to see that sight.

But shepherds,

ah yes,

shepherds with their flock

of lambs who needed tender, watchful care

were out upon the hill ’neath starry sky.

To them the angels came with message rare—

Glad Tidings Of Great Joy … to shepherds.

WHY?

A man who tends a flock of sheep by day,

watching over them all through the night,

searching for the one that’s gone astray

until again the lost one’s in his sight;

Who leads his followers to pastures sweet

and keeps them safe from perils they can’t see—

This kind of man, this kind was first to see

the King of Kings. They knew that it was He.

Why shepherds?

Why were they the first to view

the babe?

Because,

He was a shepherd, too.⁸

Merry Christmas!!!

Resources

1 Luke 2:13

2 Denver, John.  “Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913.”  John Denver & The Muppets A Christmas Together.  Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc., 1979.

3 Moroni 7:37

4 Ronald A. Rasband, “Glory to God,” Christmas Devotional, Dec. 2013.

5 Alma 13:26

6 John 10:14

7 “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow”, African American Spiritual

8 Bateman, Teresa.  “Shepherds.”  New Era, Dec. 1979.

Code Camp 2013

Several weeks ago, I attended Code Camp. What is code camp, you ask? Well, let me tell you. You arrive at 7am Friday morning, get all set up and settled in, and then at 8am, you begin writing a computer/mobile program, aka coding.  You continue coding for the next 24 hours. You are free to eat, sleep, and if you’re over 18, you can even leave if you need to grab snacks or something, but you have to stop coding at 8am Saturday morning. Hopefully whatever project you were working on is finished because judges then come around, and you show them what you’ve accomplished.  They then choose first place, second place, and third place winners from each division.  There were four divisions: rookie (who are given a kit to help them), novice, collegiate, and professional. My teammate Chaz and I were in the collegiate division. You were allowed to have up to 4 people on your team.

This was both mine and Chaz’s first year at code camp. I had come up with this idea to write an android app that takes pictures of things like fliers and inputs the event information into Google Calendar. We used an open source Optical Character Recognitino (OCR) program called Tesseract, which is run by Google, so we called ourselves the Tesseract Tekkies (the Tesseract is also the powerful cube Lokie steals in the Avengers movie, so we thought we were pretty cool).  Chaz worked mainly on the front end of things: he used Java (the language we were writing in) to call the Tesseract Program and get its output, and he also worked on connecting to the Andriod camera.  I worked on converting the text file Tesseract produced into things that the computer could interpret as dates and times and inserting them into the Google Calendar.

It was definitely an interesting experience.  I had expected to crash sometime in the middle of the night, but I felt alert all night.  I could feel my body getting pretty tired, and I even tried to lie down and take a nap, but my brain would not shut up!  I did crash in the car on the way back, and then I slept for like 5 hours Saturday afternoon (after I showered and ate a little snack, that is).  I got my part working at like 4 in the morning, but then I tried to make a GUI (Graphical User Interface as opposed to using command line), since I had heard the GUI was important if you wanted to win.  And I messed something up.  Once everybody started waking up the next morning, a couple of friends from another team were able to help me go back to what I’d had before, but something still wasn’t working.  We figured out that it was because Tesseract had given me a different format!  We were able to figure that out, too, and I was much happier J

Our presentation went fairly well, and we were hoping to maybe get 3^rd place in the collegiate division for our project.  When they announced the winners in the various divisions, I was in a daze, bordering on a doze.  So, when first place for the collegiate division was announced to be the Tesseract Tekkies, I was surprised, but too out of it to get really hyper and excited about it!  We really did not expect to win, and it makes me feel really good that we did.  Maybe we’ll continue working on the project and develop an app—who knows?  It would be pretty sweet, though, to have an app in Google Play.

California Adventure

Sunday we went to church (I wore one of my new outfits!) and visited with Peter’s Aunt and Uncle, who so kindly allowed us to stay at their house.  Okay, well, Peter visited with his Aunt.  His Uncle was really busy with church meetings, and I slept most of the day; I was so tired.

 So Monday we had to decide if we were going to go back to Disneyland proper or go to California Adventure.  Peter kind of left the decision to me, and I decided we would go to California Adventure since I had never been.   I am so glad we did!  While we absolutely loved being in Disneyland—it’s just magical!—we realized that most of the things we enjoyed doing most, we did in California Adventure.

As we were driving to the park, I told Peter about a restaurant called Ariel’s Grotto where the Disney Princesses come visit while you’re eating breakfast or lunch.  It was kind of pricey, I didn’t think we would actually go there, but Peter said, “Well, why don’t we see if they have any reservations available”.  We had tried to get into one of the nice restaurants at Disneyland on Saturday, and they said they were booked until like 3 days later, so I figured, yeah, right.  They aren’t going to have any spaces available.  So, Peter called, and they had two lunch spaces.  We took one!

Starting Our Day, Riding the Tram

We rode the tram from the parking garage to Downtown Disney.  We wondered a Disney store for a bit, then headed into the park.  We weren’t sure what to do first, but we decided to head toward the Hollywood section.  The first thing we ended up doing was Turtle Talk with Crush from Finding Nemo.  It was actually pretty cool because Crush really asked questions to specific people he pointed out by what they were wearing and responded to what they said.  He also answered questions from the audience.  It was more fun than we expected!

Turtle Talk with Crush

Photo with Max from A Goofy Movie!

I'm in Hollywood!

We continued wandering and ended up watching a show in the main roundabout with Newsies and Mickey Mouse that was pretty fun! 

We were hungry, so we got a Mickey Mouse pretzel!  It was so cute!  

 Next came Tower of Terror.  I thought this was going to be really scary and that things would jump out at me, but it was a lot shorter than I expected it to be.  Peter even said it seemed shorter than he remembered.

Peter making a creepy face while waiting for Tower of Terror

Outside Flo's in Car Land

 One of the best things about California Adventure was that there were very few people there.  I’m not sure if it was because it was a Monday or if everyone was just at Disneyland, but lines were really quite short.  We rode several of the cars rides, and the line for Luigi’s Flying Tires was longer than most, so we had time to take a few pictures.

Took this picture because we stayed the night in Barstow

I’m not a huge fan of Little Mermaid, but her ride was pretty fun, and it actually made me want to watch the movie.

We also saw some Toy Soldiers do a little show.

We went to the Aladdin musical, and it was very good.  Genie was funny (although he didn’t have quite the comedic timing of the Black Stache at the Shakespeare Festival), but my favorite part was “A Whole New World” where Aladdin and Jasmine fly on Carpet above the audience!  We realized they actually have two actors each for Aladdin and Jasmine because the characters don’t have time to get between the carpet that flies above the audience and the stage in between scenes.

Waiting for Aladdin to Start

The Stage

Next we wandered to the boardwalk area, where we rode California Screamin’.  We also got to take a picture with Buzz, although we had waited in line for a picture with Jessie.  The poor little girl in front of us had waited in line for Jessie twice, and both times Jessie left just as her family got to the front of the line.  The photographer made a note, though, that they were to go to the front of the line next time Jessie was there for pictures.

Finally, it was time for lunch with the princesses!  I was both excited and nervous.  I knew we were paying a little more for this meal, so I really wanted it to be worth it: I wanted to really meet the princesses and for the food to be good.  When we came down the stairs we got a picture with Ariel (since it was her Grotto lol).  

Then we sat down to eat.  There were only a few menu choices, so we were able to order relatively quickly.

I waited anxiously for our food and the princesses.  Then, the herald came out and announced the first princess!  It was Belle!  Yay!  We really would get to meet them.  And Belle is one of my very favorite princesses.  I was so excited I could barely eat.  I didn’t want to have anything in my teeth when I got my pictures with the beautiful princesses.  I think I was at least as excited as any of the little girls in the room :D

Ariel’s Grotto was definitely a highlight, and someday I want to take my little girls (if I have any) there.

When we left Ariel’s Grotto we crossed the street to a little store.  While we were wandering, a phone rings.  A cast member says, “Jessica?”  I turned automatically, assuming she meant someone else, but then she looks at me and says, “Are you Jessica?”  I said yes, and she told me the phone was for me!  Who could it be?  It was Goofy wishing me a happy birthday!  I guess I should explain: I was still wearing the Happy Birthday button I got in Disneyland on Saturday, and it had my name on it.  I assume the cast member saw it and pressed a button so I could get a phone call from Goofy.  It was really cool, though.  If you ever go to Disneyland and you’re celebrating anything, go get a button!  They have ones for birthdays, anniversaries, and even ones that just say “I’m celebrating!” (The girl who served us ice cream Saturday night gave Peter one of those).  It is the best because all of the cast members wish you a happy birthday—the princesses wished me a happy birthday, too.

Next we went and rode Toy Story Midway Mania where you get to shoot at targets and earn points.  We actually really enjoyed this ride.  I would have enjoyed it more except by the time we got through the line, I needed a potty break so very badly I could barely concentrate on anything except hurrying along.  Then we rode Mickey’s Fun Wheel, which has normal Ferris Wheel seats and seats around the edge on runners that slide with the movement of the wheel.   Of course, we rode the moving seats!  The most fun part, though, was they sat us with another couple and we talked and got to know them a little bit.

Then I staked out a seat for the parade while Peter went to get some fast passes.  While waiting I called my mom, and I returned a call from Peter’s dad, who was calling to wish me a happy birthday.

Then we rode Grizzly River Run, which is a white water rafting ride, and once again, we timed it so we rode the wet ride as it was cooling off!  It was all right, though, and the ride really was fun.  We then went over and rode Soarin’ over California, which is quite cool.  They make you feel like you’re parasailing over all of California, and they even include scents!

We had a little time before the evening show, so we decided to go to the Animation Studio.  We kind of hemmed and hawed about whether we wanted to do it, but once we did, we wished we had come and done it sooner so we could have done it more!  It was so cool.  We decided to come back fifteen minutes after we finished the Minnie workshop for the Pluto workshop.  It was awesome.  Neither of us are artists, but our pictures really look like the characters we were supposed to be drawing!

My Minnie

Peter's Minnie

We bought churros because Peter had wanted one since we got to Disneyland, and then we went to get seats for World of Color.  While we were waiting, we heard some girls behind us (who were clearly from California) say that they liked World of Color so much better than Fantasmic.  We, as lovers of Fantasmic, both thought that maybe they were just ‘too cool’ for Fantasmic.  Then we actually saw World of Color.  It is my new favorite show, I think.  It was amazing!  The light the water with colors so it looks like paint, and they mix the fountain show with projected video of Disney Movies.  It was so cool.

(Btw, these pictures are not in order since we had two cameras and we were both taking some pictures)

I have several videos of World of Color, but I'm going to go ahead and post this and upload them later.

Finally our Disneyland trip was over.  We did stop to buy a few souvenirs, since we had been trying to decide what we wanted all weekend.  I was very happy with what we got.

We left Tuesday morning (which was my actual birthday), and I was kind of sad to leave.  We stopped by Chick-fil-a to get breakfast, but we missed the window for breakfast!  I was going to be upset because I really wanted some chicken minis.  But luckily, they still had some!  Yay!  Someone was watching out for me so I’d have a happy day on my actual birthday, as well as the birthday weekend J

Then Peter drove all the way home, bless him.  I planned on switching, but we never did.  It was such a good birthday present.   I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I have the bestest husband!  Thanks, Peter!  I love you!

After Fall Break, we were, of course, all rested up and ready to go back to school!