To Maisie , Love Dixie

Thinking of Maisie and family reniouns and such its been awhile, but I always remember how Maisie would always pickmup a crying child or help one of the aunts out with her kids.  Her spirt affects both the kids and is very helpful to parents so this year I wanted to do something that involved kids. I have babysat multiple times this year and especially this season for free for temple nights or priesthood/ relief society activities. Many parents at a huge relief society chritmas gathering brought there kids in the nursery to me. I loved doing it all in the name of Maisie . One special occasion was when a couple hadnt gone to the temple for a year because of there poor budget and busy working lives. I felt then of the power of giving to families,  which I think Maisie does perfectly.

Merry Christmas Andrew! love, Emma

Dear Andrew,

You are an amazing example to me. I am so glad that you live so close to me and that we can go fun places together like Lagoon!  I admire so many things about you. I love that you are so nice to your siblings and you are patient with them. Of course my mom suggested that I try to be kind to my siblings but that was too hard.

This year I decided to babysit for people for free to serve you. I babysat for about 10 hours over a few different weeks. I was really grateful for this experience because whenever I have tried to tell people not to pay me in the past, they still give me the money.  This time I had to refuse the money they tried to give me and explain my service to you.  

Thanks for being such a great cousin!  Merry Christmas!

love,

Emma

Merry Christmas Brianne! love, Laura

Merry Christmas Sister Brianne Kirkby!  I was so excited to start serving you this year. 

The first way that I served you was in my current calling as a Ward Missionary.  I try to be like you in sharing the love of Christ with those I teach and serve in my ward. 

In March, I got to teach both Junior and Senior Primary about how they can be missionaries right now.  We sang all the great missionary primary songs and I told them about ‘cool beans’ tradition in our family.  I then encouraged them to be missionaries now by serving and loving everyone around them. 

Alyssa joined Lehi Marching Band in August, and I kept thinking I wanted to do something for the Drum Majors since you were the Drum Major your senior year in High School.  I decided to put together a little ‘goodluck package’ for them when they headed out for their final competition the last weekend in October.  Lehi has 4 Drum Majors, so here is a picture with 3 of them early in the morning before they left for St. George.  The band had a great season, only losing one competition, and ended up winning the State 4A Championships that weekend!

Finally, we got to have our own missionaries over for dinner, (which is a real treat since they cover quite a few stakes in our area and our ward only get the ‘chance’ to feed them a few times a year.  We had a good evening with the Elders and were grateful for their testimonies and the Spirit they brought into our home. 

I am learning that being a missionary is hard work!  We are missionaries every time we share the love of our Savior, every time.   It is something that I will continue to work on and hope to get better at.  I love you Brianne, and I’m so grateful for your example to all of us.  Merry Christmas.

To Lydia From Maegann

I hope you'll like this project I made for you in Mine Craft. It took some time and now Im done. Thanks to my dads help in turning it into a video. It's about you growing up all over the country and the experiences you had in Utah, Texas, NC, and back to Utah. Have a Merry Christmas!

 -Maegann

To Darcy, Love Alyssa

This year I had the privilege of doing my service project for the wonderful Darcy Dittbrenner! As I began thinking about what I could do for Darcy, I thought about a lot of the qualities I love about her. Darcy has such a strong testimony, is such a good listener, is so funny, is an amazing older sister, and so much more. I love so many things about her and I look up to her so much! As I thought about Darcy, I also thought about how she is a freshman in college at BYU Hawaii! (Lucky!) And I decided that my service project this year would be helping some BYU freshman here in Utah. 

For my service project, I wanted to help out students at BYU during the stressful finals week. So I put some candy in bags and attached a card to each of the bags with a funny meme to make them smile.

My mom and I drove to BYU on the Tuesday of finals week and went to the testing center with a basket of candy bags. It was freezing outside, and you could feel the stress of all of the students going in to take their tests. We went inside the creepy old testing center building and handed out candy bags to all the students passing by. They were all super grateful and it was so cool to be able to make 75 people's days better as they were going through finals week. 

I love you so much Darcy and I hope you're having an awesome time at BYU Hawaii! Merry Christmas! Love, Alyssa

Merry Christmas Katherine, Love Cindy!

We are so glad to have Katherine closer to us this year, than in previous years. It is a real treat for me especially since she has been in Hawaii since before I joined the family! Katherine is a family woman, but was also a major component of their family business in Hawaii. My service was to a family in my ward with a very similar situation.

The father had gone hiking with three of his six kids during the early part of Fall. On mile 3, of what was supposed to be a 15 mile hike/camp, his legs gave out and it was clear there was something very wrong. Soon he had to be life-flighted off the mountain and was admitted in the ICU. For a couple of weeks, it was unclear if he was even going to survive.

Their family business is a cleaning company that specializes in corporate offices. They have very limited employees, since it was still in the start up phase, so as the owners it's essential to be directly involved on a daily basis to clean their accounts. When the owner of this company was in the ICU fighting for his life, their business was threatened - as were the continuous paychecks to financially support the family.

It was a time of emergency, so many of our ward members and I volunteered to come and clean their accounts as needed, until he recovered. My opportunity was on an evening to clean an office space in West Valley. I vacuumed all the floors, cleared out all the trash, and washed windows and glass doors. This was a small thing that I could do to help this family in a REALLY big way.

As I did this service, I thought of Katherine helping out in ways she can with Solution Contracting. It would be awful if something like this had happened to Ben while they were out there, and my hope is that this family could feel our love for them, in a similar way that I'm able to show my love for Katherine this year. Merry Christmas Katherine!

P.S. - It has taken many months, but the father has made a great recovery, expected to be a full recovery in the coming years.

for Jimae from brian: "science yo!"

when the Christmas assignment fairy gave me the assignment of Jimae for Christmas, my first thought was "is there any two people in the family that are more dissimilar than Jimae and myself?" i needed to figure out how to channel my inner Jimae to discover what kind of service i could do that would represent Jimae's interests and/or modus operandi.

after much stressful deliberation, someone finally stumbled on an idea i thought i could make work: "why don't you throw a tea party for young girls the way Jimae does?"

and i thought "well, that would be humiliating and funny, so why not?!"

as i explored the idea further, i realized how i would feel if my 5-10 yr. old daughter got an invite to a tea party from a 46 year old man. that would be just creepy. couple that with the fact that it was this 46 year old man:

and you can clearly see that this is an idea that simply cannot be.

just.
plain.
wrong!

but then i thought "i wonder if it could be an 'inspired by' type of service instead of trying to be exactly like Jimae. is there some way i could pivot this idea that wouldn't be so creepy, yet still be something that's fun and engaging for kids.

science party!

and it hit me, i could throw a "science party" to get young kids interested in science!

instead of streamers, we'd have oobleck and dry ice! instead of different kinds of pastries, we'd have pop rocks and raisins! instead of tea, we'd have diet coke and mist!

i could use all those things to show some of the strange properties of everyday substances you find around the house and get kids excited about the magic in the world around them.

my excellent wife offered to extend the invitations to kids in the neighborhood (so it would be less creepy) and my talented sister-in-law, Laura, made the invitations.

now, i just needed to have experiments ready for the party. i had spent a couple of hours looking for suitable experiments to do and even tried a few out. some didn't really work out, but others had the "WOW" factor i was looking for and i figured it would be enough to engage the kids for an hour or so.

all morning long, as we were preparing the house and experiments, my kids would just blurt out "science, yo!" to stay motivated on the preparation. i think it was a default answer to the question of "how does that work?", "science, yo!"

when party time came, we had about 10 kids show up.

dancing raisins

for the first experiment, i showed the kids a video from the 80s of the claymation california grapes dancing and singing:

i asked the kids if they had ever seen raisins dance before and one kid blurted out "those aren't real raisins!" i responded, "you are right, but would you like to make real raisins dance?"

and, of course, what kid would say "no" to that? i had them hooked now.

so i poured some mist soda in a beaker and dropped some raisins in the soda to watch them dance:

and dance they did (not actual footage):

CO2 ballon

next, i placed two packets of poprocks in a ballon and upended it into a small bottle of sprite. the released CO2 of the poprocks mixed with the released CO2 of the soda causes it to inflate the balloon:

it was at this point that i had to let the kids know that they were not playing with soda and candy, but today they are seeing dangerous chemicals in action!

Diet Coke and Mentos

next, we went outside to show them the Diet Coke and Mentos trick:

this was, by far, their favorite. unfortunately, i only had purchased one bottle of diet coke.

Carbon Bubble

for the last of the CO2 experiments, we pulled out the dry ice and put it in a clear bowl with hot water. the kids ooohed and aaahed about the smoke that was being released. then, we took a soapy rag and wet the edge of the bowl and swiped the rag across the bowl to create a dry ice bubble:

Oobleck

lastly, i taught the kids to say "non-newtonian fluid."

"when your parents ask what you learned today, tell them that you learned what a non-newtonian fluid is."

it's basically a substance that has properties of both a fluid and a solid. we then made a non-newtonian fluid called "oobleck" by combining corn starch and water. when you do this, you create a substance you can pour like water, but when you try to punch it, it acts like a solid.

because oobleck can get messy, i asked my son to make it for us (wanted to keep my pristine lab coat clean :D)

i didn't get any footage of our oobleck in action, but here is a video to show how it works:

somebody also decided to make a small pool of oobleck:

conclusion

who knows what the legacy of the "science party" will be. at one point a kid looked at me in my lab coat, with a sense of wonder in his eyes and voiced breathlessly "are YOU a SCIENTIST?!" it was said with the same reverence and respect that you might expect a kid to ask if someone were a professional basketball player.

jimae's generous spirit of providing a magical time for kids might very well have a legacy of spawning a scientific interest in a child who then proceeds to move the world forward. but, even if it doesn't spark the next einstein or curie, and all it did was delight some kids for an hour on an otherwise dull saturday afternoon, it had the true spirit of jimae all over it.

so thanks for the inspiration jimae! i had such a good time that i'm thinking of making it an annual thing.