Merry Christmas 2023

For the first time in four years, we were finally able to get our whole family together for a picture. Sterling and Soren overlapped a few months on their 2-year missions so it wasn't like we were lazy, it just wasn't possible for that long! We've had some pretty awesome additions in those four years - a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law and three grand babies that I can't imagine my life without. So here's the WHOLE Stowell family - all of my favorite people in one picture. Life is good!

Merry Christmas! 

Merry Christmas 2022

It's been a great year! We visited New York, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Tennessee. We bought a 1986 29-foot Terry Camper Trailer. Sadie and Jeff have been renovating it and it's almost ready to hit the campground for it's first away-from-home trial run. It looks amazing!

We added a grandbaby to our family in August. Becca is bright eyed and completely adorable. That makes two of the cutest grandkids ever with number three ready to make her debut any day now. 

Sterling has been home from his mission for a year and is loving BYU. Soren is in the Utah Salt Lake City Mission and has less than 8 months left. Time has been going crazy fast!

Sam just moved back home with the hopes of opening a country dance club. He's trying to locate a venue. He has many people pulling for him, hoping it works out. It will be a perfect addition to our little town. 

We're looking forward to 2023. It really is a Wonderful Life!!

Merry Christmas 2021

It's hard to believe 2021 is already coming to an end. After 2020, which felt like the longest year ever, 2021 has flown by. It's been full of so many great moments and memories. Just a few of the highlights include: two college grads (Savannah in April, Sam in December), our first grandbaby - Walker is the cutest little guy ever (ever!!), Soren graduating from high school in May then leaving to serve in the Utah Salt Lake City mission at the end of the summer, Sterling returning home from the Texas San Antonio mission last week.  

There's plenty to look forward to in 2022. But for now, I'm happy to just pause and be grateful for the baby born in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago, the Savior of the world. 

Merry Christmas!

So Much To Be Grateful For

Wow. 2020. What can I say? Goodbye and good riddance? But even after all the grief the year has brought, I can't help but feel really grateful for the beautiful things we've experienced. I've posted next to nothing, but that's not because there's been nothing happy to post. Two weddings (Savannah in January, Spencer in November), our first grandbaby on the way, more time together at home, our 25th wedding anniversary, time with family in Utah and Idaho, and Sterling's unique missionary opportunities in Texas, just to name a few. We have many reasons to look back on this year, smile, and be grateful. In so many ways, good and bad, it's been a year like no other. Let's focus on the good.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas 2019

Wow! It's been a great year! Savannah returned from her mission in July; Spencer in October. We drove to Utah for Thanksgiving so that we could get a family picture before Sterling left on his mission on December 18. We haven't been together for the holidays since 2016 so I'm glad we made the effort to all be together, however briefly. I sure love these guys.



I've done a lot of hand lettering this past year. I love to doodle various sayings and words. This was the back of our Christmas card. I wrote it in pencil on white paper, smudged it a bit, then scanned it and reversed the colors. I love how it looks just like chalk on a chalkboard!

We have a lot to look forward to in 2020. Let's make it our best year so far!

Merry Christmas 2018

The Stowells are alive and well. It's been a good year and we have so much to look forward to! Our two missionaries will both come home in 2019 and, if all goes well, Sterling will graduate from high school a year early in May. It's possible that I could have 4 kids at BYU in January 2020!

With our missionaries out, I couldn't get a family picture this year. I could have pieced together a Christmas card with everyone here and there, but I wanted us all together so I hatched a plan that worked out beautifully!

Isn't that awesome? I commissioned Sadie's 13-year old friend, Jack, to draw our family picture and I am so happy with how it turned out. The word "Christmas" is something I doodled on the back of my church program a couple weeks ago and my friend, Jen, digitized it for me. (Jen and I have started a little Etsy shop with these digitized files -- I'll blog more about that later!)

I was a little worried about getting the cards out before Christmas. I received the finished drawing on Sunday, December 16th and had the card designed and ready for the printer on the morning of the 17th. The week before Christmas felt like a bad time for a rush order at the printers, but I walked into my favorite print shop at 9:20 Monday morning and, literally, walked out at 9:30 with a stack of 90 cards -- printed, cut and shrink wrapped! It was a happy little miracle and my cards were in the mail Monday afternoon.

Life is good! We have been so blessed and can see God's hand in our lives on a daily basis. We are grateful for the Savior and the opportunity to celebrate His birth.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

High School Christmas Concert

The other day, I said I'd share a couple of videos from the High School Choir Christmas concert. I realized today that it's now or never if I want to get this done before Christmas!

Here are three of my favorite numbers.

Sterling had a solo in The First Noel, performed by the school a cappella group, Maximum Forte.



White Winter Hymnal is a song they got from Pentatonix. Maximum Forte learned the hand motions and it's so cool! I wish they were sitting farther back on the stage so we could see the whole group at once. They were sitting on stools really close to the audience so the camera was only able to get so much, but the sound alone makes this worth posting.



This last one is all the choirs combined, singing Variations on Jingle Bells. It's super fun. Soren is tucked behind someone near the front. Sterling is easily seen.

Light the World - Day 1

Today is the start of the Light the World campaign by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are challenges each day leading up to Christmas - different ways to Light the World through service. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to join in. Just think of what a difference we can make!

Today's challenge is found in Matthew 10:8 - "Freely ye have received, freely give." 

I love today's video. I wish there were vending machines like this in my little corner of the world!



What am I doing today? I'm going to make a donation to my favorite charity, Educate the Kids. It's run by a friend of mine from Scotland. 100% of donations go to help the children in a small village in Kenya. Educate the Kids has built an orphanage and two schools for these kids. They also provide lunch (and sometimes breakfast) each day for the school children. For some, this is the only food these kids get. I've been feeling so, so grateful for all my blessings and know that a little bit will go a long way to help those in extreme poverty. Educate the Kids is working miracles for these children through education.

Go to https://www.mormon.org/ to find out more about the campaign and to see all the challenges. Are you in?

Let's do this! We can #LighttheWorld. :)

Friends on Display

About half of our Christmas card wall.

I love our Christmas card display. In the weeks after Thanksgiving, it makes me so happy to check the mail and clip all the incoming Christmas cards to a wire that stretches the width of our dining room. While I don't really keep track from year to year, it feels like we got more cards than ever in 2016. Rather than overlapping and trying to fit them all in a row, this year after a row was full we just clipped additional cards in new rows beneath the first so they are all visible at once.

I know it's February, but I'm not ready to take the cards down quite yet. These are family and friends - most of them far away - and I like having them close to remind me how blessed we are!

A Snowy Nativity

Isn't this pretty? With the snow sprinkled mountains, sparse clouds, and the Provo temple as a beautiful backdrop to the Holy Family, it is the picture of calm. Thanks, Sam, for sharing a glimpse of your world.

Merry Christmas!

One More Sleep

We just finished up one of our favorite Christmas Eve traditions -- watching The Muppet Christmas Carol. It just wouldn't be Christmas without it! We have to wait until Christmas Eve to watch it because, after all, there's only one more sleep 'til Christmas!



My favorite song is Bless Us All, sung by Tiny Tim.

Bless us all who gather here,
The loving family I hold dear.
No place on earth compares with home
And every path will bring me back from where I roam.
Bless us all that as we live,
We always comfort and forgive.
We have so much that we can share
With those in need we see around us everywhere. ...

Sweet Dreams! Tomorrow is going to be great. :)

Pasta Angels

I attended a writing group last night for the first time in several years. It was a blast! To start off, we were given twenty minutes to write on the prompt "Projects." We could interpret that however we wanted, from class projects to Christmas projects to the lack of projects, etc. Everyone was then invited to share what they wrote. Some were serious; most were funny. Here is what I wrote. It's a story worth remembering.

They were just the cutest little ornaments. The delicate angels looked like porcelain, but they were made almost entirely out of pasta. Bowtie pasta made the wings and dress, elbow macaroni formed the arms, and the little wooden bead head was covered in Acini de Pepe or what I call "frog-eye" pasta to look like curly hair. A few coats of white spray paint and a dash of translucent glitter was finished off with a little ribbon rose nestled in each angel's arms with a beaded halo on top.

I learned to make them at a church craft fair and decided I must make them for everyone I knew. How hard could it be? I started off just fine, but then the demands of the season started creeping in.

I was making them assembly-line style, one step at a time when I had a few minutes here and there. But then it came time to put the hair on my tray full of angels. For some reason this crippled me. It was the most tedious step and suddenly I felt overwhelmed. I put it off for days. One night I came home from a meeting and complained to my husband about all the demands on my time. I finished off with, "And I've still got to put hair on all of those angels!" At that, my husband of only six months said, "Come look at your hairless little angels." 

I walked over to the tray to find that my very masculine Jeff had laid aside his studies to spend the entire evening calmly and methodically spreading glue on my angels' little bald heads and then sticking them in the tiny pasta balls to cover every single angel head with hair.

That was 21 years ago, but I will never forget that selfless act of love.

A Soft Bed for Jesus

For the past three weeks we've drawn names every Sunday. During the week we do nice things for our person. For each act of service, we get to put a straw in our popsicle-stick manger. We're trying to make a soft bed for the baby Jesus before Christmas.

Some of us are doing really well (some not so much, like...um...whoever has my name). Some of us are excited to find opportunities to secretly do something without getting caught while others ask "Who has my name?" when they have a job to do, hoping their someone will volunteer. :) As you can see, it's far from perfect. But overall, it's a positive alternative to the gimme attitude that all-too-often prevails at this time of year.

And our little makeshift manger is filling right up!

#lighttheworld

Tomorrow is Day One of the #lighttheworld campaign for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. #Lighttheworld issues a challenge to follow the example of the Savior and be a light to the world (see John 8:12). There is a different challenge for each day of December through Christmas. 

I love this video. My favorite part is how it shows Christ helping someone and then it shows someone in our day performing a similar service. I got all teary-eyed the first time I watched it because it reminded me of my last days with my dad. I would sit with him for hours, even as he slept, and it didn't feel like a burden. His last night at home, he was up every five or ten minutes - in too much pain to sleep and needing to clear the mucous out of his lungs by gargling and spitting. It hurt too much for him to cough and he couldn't swallow. We wiped his face and made sure he had what he needed. We tried to make him as comfortable as possible, but it was heart-wrenching to be so helpless to relieve his suffering. I know that any of us who were caring for him would have done anything to give him even a few minutes of relief. It was a blessing to serve him. The video above shows that spirit of service.  

Tomorrow the challenge is to participate in the Worldwide Day of Service. Just find a way to serve someone else, big or small. 

If you go to mormon.org, you can download the "In 25 Ways. Over 25 Days." advent calendar. (Just scroll down a little from the video.) It spells out the challenges for each day. 

I'm excited. :)

A Missionary's Pocket

Look what Sam sent me for Christmas --

Isn't that just the greatest gift for a Missionary Mum? My heart melted as soon as I saw it. And as if that missionary badge wasn't enough, that pocket was stuffed full of all the typical things you'd find in a missionary's pocket...

Yep, a Missionary Handbook and a collection of pass-along cards. Isn't that the sweetest gift? I love it so much! And I sure love that cute missionary who sent it to me. :)

My Favorite Part of Christmas

This will come as no surprise. My favorite part of Christmas was Skyping with Sam in Arizona! It was so good to see him and hear his voice. He is doing really well and he's happy. :)

I didn't even cry until about the last 30 seconds as we were saying our goodbyes. I doubt Sam even knew I was crying. Of course, after we hung up I had to take a moment to compose myself and I felt like bawling my eyeballs out, but I must have been distracted by one thing or another because the feeling passed and I was fine.

Only 7 months to go! July will be here before we know it.

I sure love that boy!

Let Him In

Merry Christmas!

All Hearts Come Home