More Catching Up

It wasn't until I sat down this evening to round out my overview of the year 2011 that I realized just what a busy year it was for the Hatch family, at least the part that I was involved in.  It was another year of many grandbabies added to the clan, five to be exact.  I gave a highlight previously of my visit to Andrew and Melissa's in January 2011 when Asher was born.  He was born January 30, 2011.

Before I could return home, Heidi had her baby, Jeremiah Tyler Poole, who was born on February 9, 2011.  What a difficult two weeks followed as we watched and waited to see if the doctors at Primary Children's Medical Center would be able to perform surgeries that would spare his life.

First hopeful days...                                                              ...then saying goodbye.

                                                 Sweet Jeremiah, such a short earthly sojourn.

On February 22, 2011, after a brief but valiant struggle, he returned to our Heavenly Father's loving arms.  His funeral service was on February 26, 2011...

...and then he was buried in Grandpa Hatch's plot in American Fork Cemetery.

March, April, and May were filled with preparations for Wood Badge, which was the last week of May.
 I began my summer fun at Katrina's in June and then took off a couple of weeks to stay with Sonia and Shane when Braxton Shane Leishman was born, which was June 30, 2011.

Braxton never looked like a newborn.  He has always been a little man.

Spittin' image of his dad!

                                 Braxton's blessing day.




In August, I enjoyed the Sevier County Fair with Katrina's family.  Each year the girls' cakes are better than the year before.  It has been fun watching them learn and grow.  

Kylie's cake

Kadance's cake

Kasidy's cake

I went to Sonia's the end of August to help celebrate Taylor's 3rd birthday.  Sonia made such a cute cake for her.

In September, I went to Lyman, Wyoming to spend some time with Aaron and Sherri's family when Madalyn Ann Hatch was born on September 19, 2011--what a sweet baby girl, Aaron's princess.

This year Anson turned 40 and Lora wanted to help him celebrate this milestone with a little vacation, even though she was pregnant and not feeling the greatest.  I flew to Tracy and spent a few days with Camden and Sydney while Anson and Lora went to Las Vegas with some friends.  When they returned I stayed a couple more days, and on Oct 17th we got to go to the Great Pumpkin Patch (aka Dell'Osso Family Farm).

Sydney and Camden prepare to ride the go-carts.

Sydney on the ropes course.

Anson and Camden ride the safe version of a zip line while Sydney rode the real deal.

Sydney and Camden being silly.

Anson and Sydney shooting the pumpkin cannon.

This was followed by another Halloween celebration at Heidi's in Clearfield on October 19th.

The following week, I went to Sonia's again for a few days and spent the real Halloween with them.  Fun times.

My last visit of the year was a trip to Columbus, Ohio to see Alex and Laura's new baby, Reed Clark Hatch, born December 4, 2011.  I had a great time while I was there.

At Christmastime Andrew and Melissa and their boys came for a visit as well as Anson and Lora.  On Christmas day, everyone got together for our annual Christmas gathering, and we shared food and talents and had another memorable Nativity Play and talent show.  There was the usual sharing of sick bugs also, if I am not mistaken.

After Christmas some of us made a trip to Salt Lake City.  We spent some time at the Hansen Planetarium, ate at the Lion House Pantry, played at the Children's Exhibit at the Church History Museum,  and enjoyed the lights at Temple Square.

It was great to be able to spend so much time with family.  A wonderful year.

Wood Badge May 2011--Mutual Dell

I have not been a very consistent historian this last year. I have written letters to my family almost weekly, but have not shared anything on my Blog so that it can be included when I ever get around to publishing it. I went back to my family letters and extracted this information about my third Wood Badge experience the last week of May, 2011. It was a wonderful experience to work so closely with the great Scout leaders in American Fork East Stake. A lot of the participants were also from the East Stake, but I had a few in my Owl Patrol who were not--Jim White from Highland, Kasey Walker from West American Fork, and Nancy Davies from Eagle Mountain (I think). Here is the letter that I wrote on May 30, 2011, with a few pictures added.

 I just finished my third experience with Wood Badge last week, this time as a Troop Guide for an amazing Owl Patrol.

   

 Owl Patrol: (Left to right) Me, Jim White, Tony Anderson, Nancy Davies, Greg Squires, and Kasey Walker in front; Ryan Gunther and Lerin Porter in back.

Senior Patrol Leader Sam Liddiard and Scoutmaster John Miller

Staff and Participants

 It was fun to have Ammon and Brian on this Wood Badge course also. I sure enjoyed myself and learned so much. The first time there was just so much to digest that it didn't all sink in. Then I was on staff for a course last August and learned some of the things that I had missed the first time. This time I was a Troop Guide again and it was an absolutely amazing experience because I was not as worried as the first time that I was on staff. I was able to concentrate more on the principles that we taught instead of always worrying about what came next. Over the coming weeks I hope to be able to put into words some of the lessons I learned so you can share in my experience. We were in American Fork Canyon at Mutual Dell and there was no internet or cellphone service so we felt quite isolated but we prayed that the Lord would take care of our families at home while we were away from them. See Teresa's Blog for her experience getting locked in a downstairs bedroom with her boys and how she was blessed to get out of that predicament. I have a conviction of the value of Wood Badge in helping leaders of boys in Scouting and also in their personal and work lives. I witnessed a lot of opposition thrown at those who were on staff and I am convinced that it is because of the importance of the lessons to be learned at Wood Badge that Satan doesn't want to see happen because of the great strength it can be in doing the Lord's work. Sam Liddiard, who was the Senior Patrol Leader for the course, had his father die a week before Wood Badge and his funeral was the day before we began. He could have asked to be excused from serving on course but he did not. The morning that we were to begin, Bishop Back's son came up a bit early to let him know that his mother-in-law had died that morning. He could have gone home also to help his wife with funeral arrangements, but he did not. I had some personal obstacles to overcome. Each time I have gone there has been a fear I have had to face. The first time it was just a fear of being put in a patrol with a bunch of strangers and having to stretch the limits of my interpersonal relations and doing silly things like songs and skits in front of a crowd of strangers. I conquered that one. On staff last summer I had to go to bed each night knowing that there were mice running around in the cabin where I was staying. That kind of freaked me out but I made it through that one. I know, it is a silly thing but nevertheless it made me very uncomfortable.

This time I was more aware of the fact that we were camping in bear country (IN TENTS). My flashlight was not used so much to see the ground in front of my feet but to search to the end of the flashlight's beam to make sure there were no bears "out there." Of course, no one encountered a bear and I was mighty thankful for that. 

 My worst opposition came when I went to take a shower the third day. The women's showers were reserved for the eight women on course from 9:30 p.m. until 5:30 a.m. and after that they let the men use them. One day I decided to shower in the evening. I took a very quick shower and washed my hair and reached out to get my towel and realized that I had forgotten to bring it with me. Now what? I had my dirty clothes, the ones that I was going to put on and I had a headband that I use to keep my hair out of the way when I wash my face. I ended up using the headband to dry off. Not very efficient I decided. Next I went to the sink area with my dripping wet hair and plugged in my hair dryer to blow dry my hair. The hair dryer worked on Monday morning but now it did not. No amount of fiddling with the reset buttons would get it to work again. I tried to dry my hair to some degree with my curling iron but that is hard on hair and was very ineffective because of how wet my hair was, so I finally gave up and decided to see if one of the other ladies was still up so that I could borrow her hair dryer. Fortunately I was able to borrow one and got my hair dried so I could go to bed, albeit a bit later than I had hoped. The strange thing is, when I came home and unpacked I decided that I would just throw away the useless hair dryer. I plugged it in to make sure I hadn't been imagining things that night, and sure enough, it worked for me. I had a chance to laugh at myself that night but it did not discourage me or keep me from having an amazing experience. Well, it is late so I will write more next week. I hope you all had a good week and will do great things this week. Love, Mom/Grandma/Colleen

A glimpse at a week of Wood Badge

Serious times...

Competition...

Skits and Silliness...

Devotionals...

Taps...

and Farewells.

Back to Gilwell, Happy Land...

Going Back Once More

Today I was working on another grandbaby quilt. As I was ironing quilt pieces I thought of how much I enjoy my extra wide ironing board and lightweight steam iron. For an instant I went back to when I was a child in my semi-pioneer home in Montana. I call it that because it was a homesteader's home built about 1900 and then converted to fit my parents' growing family when we moved there in 1951. It was outfitted with conveniences like the old tin tub, the "outhouse", the oil-burning stove (later changed to coal burning stove), and a few conveniences that came later like an electric washing machine, and even later an electric dryer and eventually even a telephone by the time I was in junior high school.

When I was really young, my mom had a couple of the old-fashioned irons (the original flatirons which are not even remotely like the "flatirons" used for hair today) that have to be heated on a stove or other heat source.
(These are similar to the ones I saw as a child.)
She showed us how to use them, but we had an electric iron so we didn't need to use them for real. One needed to own more than one so that there would always be a hot one. When one cooled off, it was placed back on the heat in exchange for a hot one.

Denise and I started ironing clothes at a very young age. We started with handkerchiefs, dish towels and pillow cases and later graduated to shirts and dresses. Nearly everything we wore had to be ironed because there were not many synthetic fabrics then, mostly cottons. We didn't have steam irons so we had to "sprinkle" the clothes to help get the wrinkles out. We would get all ambitious and sprinkle the whole batch at once and then begin ironing. Of course we didn't get through even a small portion of them so what did we do to keep the rest of the clothes from getting mildew until we could iron them? Easy. We just put the clothes in the freezer until next ironing day.


My mom was lucky at some point to get an Ironrite mangle iron; don't ask me where she got it. It was similar to this one (This lady is not related:)) It looks like something you might have seen at a dry cleaners. It didn't seem to me that we were rich enough to own such a device. It was quite an impressive machine, and I loved to watch mom operate it. She actually used it for the large parts of shirts and dresses but it was hard to do the areas like collars, sleeves, and yokes. Though the machine was a bit intimidating, I do remember ironing handkerchiefs and dish towels with it. I was just wondering why this amazing piece of technology of the 1940s and 1950s didn't survive to become a household necessity standing in every home of America right next to the television.

What Takes You Back?

The other day Katrina asked me to put some lotion on her arms, as she has had carpal tunnel surgery and her right hand was in a splint and she couldn't do it by herself. I told her that I liked the scent of the lotion. She said the smell of it took her back to her mission days because it was a brand that was used a lot there.

That comment reminded me of my morning walks this summer that have brought me in contact with reminders of my childhood. I think the senses that Heavenly Father has blessed us with are an amazing form of time travel. These are some of the sights, smells and sounds of small town/country life that have transported me back to our Montana farm this summer.


As I walked by the river bank leading to the Wellsville dam, I saw this abandoned car down in the old river bed a ways from the dam. On our farm, we had a few pieces of old equipment that sat in the fields rusting away. We liked to play on them. Some of them later became collectors items that Dad was able to sell. Unfortunately people really did follow up on the urge to push a useless vehicle over a cliff such as you see here. Someone at some point before we moved there in 1951 abandoned an old truck in the Musselshell River just beyond our barnyard. It just happened to be about the deepest part of the River for some distance, so it became our swimming hole. I was always kind of afraid to go near the truck when I was young, but as I got older and braver, I discovered I could touch it with my tiptoes and still have my head above water, then push away and do kind of a surface dive away from it. I never tried to explore it's depths but imagine it would look something like this old car that I guess was exposed after the dam was built on this river.






The fields with alfalfa






and sweet clover evince several memories...

the bustle of hay harvest time, scorching summer heat, dried alfalfa leaves stuck on glistening moist skin, field mice taking refuge under the bales of hay, trapdoor spiders hiding among the stubble, hershey bars tucked away in the glovebox to provide a welcome treat, the sweating canvas water bag that was our lifeline as we worked and the welcome midday meal followed by a short siesta until the sun began it's downward descent and we once more made our way to the fields.





We didn't have a flower garden when I was young, besides lilac bushes. But I enjoyed the wildflowers--that I later discovered are mostly weeds--like the dandelion--

and the morning glory. What I found interesting about both of them is that they respond to the light, their blossoms opening up in sunlight and closing up at night. We used the dandelion to predict whether someone liked butter. (If you hold a dandelion under your chin, your chin will reflect yellow in response to your love of butter, or so we were told.) I don't know how many handfuls of dandelions my mom accepted from us and graciously placed in a cup of water to beautify our kitchen:)
Another weed that I saw recently was what we erroneously called Indian tobacco. I asked Katrina if she knew the proper name and she said she thought it was Curly Dock. According to Mr. Google, it is Curly Dock.












As we played along the ditchbanks and the banks of the Musselshell River, we discovered a more elegant flower, the wild rose, whose scent no perfumer, in my opinion, has been able to successfully reproduce. I love that smell!

According to God's plan, there are also some irksome plants to afflict and torment man. Among those that I despised as a child were the Russian thistle (which turns into a tumbleweed when it is dry),

the foxtail,










purple thistle,









the burdock and cocklebur













and other sock-grabbing plants.











Then there were the trees, my favorite--but most annoying in the springtime when the cotton was flying--was the big cottonwood tree that we used to climb. We loved making whistles with the leaves.















Other plants of my childhood that fell someplace between shrubs and trees were the berry producing bushes that we enjoyed. This one was a tree, the crabapple. We used to help Mom pick crabapples from a neighbor's tree and she would make apple jelly with them. The fruit was small and it took a ton or so to make a batch of jelly. It's tartness challenged our tastebuds, and they were kind of hard to eat because they were small, the majority of the fruit being the core.


We also went on excursions with Mom to find currant bushes. I don't remember any on our property but I remember stopping along the roadside to pick a basket of currants, which my mom also turned into a beautiful, dark translucent jelly. I thought it was a form of magic the way she transformed those rather unpalatable baskets of fruit into succulent jellies.


Even though the previously mentioned fruits tasted sour to me, I felt we had made a joyful discovery the first time I tried another berry that grew along the river. This one was the Buffalo berry. It took a whole handful to make a bite. If one were to try just one berry, it would yield far less than a single pomegranate seed. The center of the berry was similar to the pulp of the pomegranate. Because the berries were so small, we didn't attempt to stand there and fill a bucket with the tiny berries. Instead, we would each break off a branch or two (we had no idea that was diminishing next year's harvest) and we would go back to the house and pick and eat the berries at our leisure. It is a very tart berry but we enjoyed eating them to see if we could eat a handful without pulling a "sour face." The most miraculous thing happened once the first frost hit those berries. Their scarlet-red color deepened in hue as they turned more translucent and they became sweet and wonderful to eat.


Lastly, as I walked past the cornfields, I was reminded of the cultivated crops in the summers of my youth--which included, in addition to our garden vegetables, the potato patches and fields of field corn. We used what is called a grain drill to plant grain as a starter crop for new alfalfa and I think to plant the corn too.

This picture that I found reminds me a lot of the grain drill that my dad had, according to my very young memory, since these were not crops that he repeated every year like the hay.






I remember sitting in the garage cutting the many gunnysacks full of seed potatoes into small pieces, making sure to have an eye or two in each chunk. Then Dad dumped the potatoes into the tractor-guided planter which distributed them in neat rows in the field. This picture reminds me of the field where Dad set us to work plucking off the potato bugs from the plants to save his crop. It was probably only about an acre of potatoes, so not his greatest farming venture, but it sure looked big to me as we set out in the morning to cover all of the rows and find the annoying potato bugs.

Another of the aged pieces of equipment that we used to play on was an old potato sorter, similar to this one. Ours was simpler and very crude, a wooden frame with a conveyor belt that sent the potatoes down to two areas.
There was a chute that could be moved back and forth between two bags to separate the small and large potatoes. I don't think we ever used it for what it was intended but we had fun on it.

Well, this ends my trip back in time, traipsing through my memories. I am actually rather exhausted but it has been quite fun!!