Girls Retreat!

And also the first day of the rest of our lives...

Abdiel started at a new gym this week, one which includes a weekly nutrition plan. Thinking it disrupts family unity for one member to eat differently than the others, Lia promptly put the whole family on the diet, minus a thousand of Abdiel's 3,000 bulking calories. We've never felt better. 💪

A huge highlight this week was Miriam participating in the Orem Baby Contest. She participated last year just to be supportive of our community; this year we didn't want to miss the chance for some America250 celebrations. We ordered her a Colonial costume and spent the last few weeks teaching her Yankee Doodle. 

There were a few complications. The first was just that Lia was scheduled to be out of town with all the other girls, leaving Justin to handle this dimunitive version of a beauty pageant by himself. He did a great job getting pigtails in, though he tried to employ help or at least assurance from some other moms in the neighborhood. The other complication was that Miriam's charm starts heading downhill beginning at 9 am until it completely disappears at her 10 am naptime. 9 am was when her time to shine was scheduled. The final complication was that--naturally--the America250 specialty category boasted by far the longest line of entrants. By the time they were almost to the front of the line, Miriam had already divested herself of hat, boots, and collared coat. Justin coaxed her back into the coat, tricked her into wearing her hat for a moment, and helped her gain momentum on the first few words of Yankee Doodle. We can all tell from these photos that she would have won had she brought her A-game. It's okay. We had a wedding reception to attend during the parade anyway, so she couldn't have taken her place on the victory float with anything resembling convenience.

 Meanwhile, the rest of the ladies were twenty minutes up the road partying it up. At a RS chocolate tasting event back around Valentine's Day, the sister leading the event mentioned that she had learned the fine art of chocolate tasting in preparation for her family's annual girls' retreat, i.e. a weekend that her mom, aunts, sisters, and female cousins congregated to have a sleepover and teach each other little workshops. Knowing that girls just want to have fun and feeling surrounded, perhaps even internally, by estrogen, Lia thought this was would be a fabulous tradition to start. Securing a weekend when everyone was free, she booked a room at the Hyatt in Lehi and everyone began prepping their lessons. By the end of 24 hours, the fearless fivesome had learned how to dress for aesthetic success based on personalized color palettes and basic fashion rules like the rule of thirds and body symmetry; practiced their new skills at Savers and the Traverse Mountain Outlets; eaten at the Food Court; cashed in on Free Frazil Friday; learned the proper ways to paint nails and remove gel nails (tin foil required); learned to crochet or loom hat; watched Enchanted; made it through a night on a hotel fold-out bed; did a hard run at the fitness center (Lia); ate a hotel breakfast; hiked Hidden Meadows loop in Draper (the girls; that earlier run proved a little too hard); played Founding Fathers in the hotel swimming pool; learned to curl hair the proper way; learned to draw foxes and owls; and purchased mall pretzels and some presents for the boys back home. 

The ladies returned to find 2/3 of the males back home completely glued to a game of Tecmobowl. We apparently did not bring civilization back a moment too soon. Abdiel then joined the Timpanogos Football float for the parade and most of the family attended a ward wedding reception in Provo. 

For a Sabbath, Justin was inordinately busy. He had an article run in The Dispatch with his colleague Hal Boyd posing the question, "Are Latter-day Saints Christian?" in response both to the Pentagon's removal of our faith from their list of Christians and to a subtle invitation to treat the topic from a trusted leader. This evening Justin delivered a masterful address to the Heatheridge Stake on inspired constitutional principles. Many of us who have heard him speak on this subject before believed it was the best treatment of the topic he has yet done. In the final call to action, he invoked President Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 query whether we have even read The Federalist Papers and then recommended three other books: Yuval Levin's American Covenant, Akhil Amar's The Constitution: A Biography, and Jeffrey Rosen's The Pursuit of Happiness. No doubt these annals will stand the test of time and be worthwhile reading even for later perusers of this blog. We ourselves can't wait to dive in, probably resurfacing with another classic Founding Father 'do, but properly curled.