Valentines

Jonny was in San Diego all week long. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. We kept busy while missing him. Christi, Jay, and Nikki rearranged some furniture to give Nikki her very own room. Christi read a whole book in the evenings, took kids to soccer practice daily, and matched a billion pairs of socks to empty out baskets.

On Thursday, Christi and the kids took their first long road trip in the van to Mesa. They arrived at 9pm and visited a bit with Grandma and Grandpa Crandall. The next morning, Christi left the older kids sleeping and headed off with Darren to the Phoenix Children's Hospital early the next morning for his mini-surgery. Everything went very smoothly. Darren had an orchiopexy (I'll let you google it). The best part was I handed him to the operating nurse happy from playing with toys in the pre-operative area. The nurse told me that he'd be asleep in 60 seconds as soon as she walked him through the door. They put him to sleep with a gas mask and then started the IV's which made for a trauma-free visit. Darren even had a little spinal epidural for pain control. That gave him 8 hours of excellent pain control which made our trip back much easier. Since then, he hasn't required anything stronger than ibuprofen and his little incisions look great.

On the way home, we were almost to Tacna (pretty much the middle of nowhere) when I glanced at the unfamiliar gauges of our new van and discovered that the gas light was on. Whoops! It had been moving down so slowly all week. It's a much larger gas tank than our mini-van. During that brief time when I wasn't sure that the distance was doable, I cut our speed to 60mph and told our kids to say a prayer. I called Jonny because we were approaching a dead cell area and told him to come looking for me if he didn't see me when he arrived home. We were driving home simultaneously, he from San Diego and us from Phoenix. The van has a nice little feature that shows exactly how many gallons of gas are left. It has a 31 gallon tank and we had used 30.4 gallons by the time I filled up in Tacna.

Saturday night, Jonny and I attended a Ward Party Luau for adults only. A ward member's family drove down from Las Vegas to show us dances from all over the Pacific. They had ties to the Polynesian Cultural Center. It was entertaining.

Valentines morning, the kids opened up wrapped boxes of girl scout cookies from Jonny and I. We ate apple dumplings and exchanged love notes.