Balloon Release

Mike had a conference in Vegas the first week of May.  We dropped the kids off at Steve and Carol's house and the baby and I went with him for the week which meant that we wouldn't all be together for Laila's birthday.  As usual, I had thought about her birthday celebration and what we should do for a few months.  Usually we put something together and plan service for the week but every time I thought about it I just felt peaceful.  There have been some big decisions and big things to think about the last few months and my mind has been in so many different places.  When it came down to it I realized that I didn't really want to put a lot of thought into her birthday celebration.  I felt like this year Laila's gift to me was a feeling of peace.  I almost felt like she was giving me permission not to worry about it.  I just felt like I didn't want one more heavy thing to think about and that she was okay with that.  The boys really wanted to have a service scavenger hunt and have a bunch of families join us for FHE and then have a celebration afterwards and I told them that we would consider it and if we could make it happen we would but that we weren't going to plan on it.  Instead, we all just tried to do service throughout the month on our own.  I noticed that the boys tried to serve one another by offering to do one another's chores.  Mike volunteered to tutor a girl in Math for free.  I made freezer meals for a friend who's son was having surgery to remove a brain tumor and helped clean someone's house for two hours.  Mike spent hours finding names for Will to take to the temple for baptisms and we talked about names they could put on the prayer roll when they went.  We also did something that we want to keep a secret.  While we were gone, Steve and Carol took the kids to the boardwalk with their cousins and they drew hearts and left coins in the hearts.  We also tried to pay special attention to the service other people were doing for us.  

Now, almost a month later, we are finally getting around to the family celebration stuff.  We like to try and do something fun together so we went bowling this week and then yesterday we did our normal balloon release and had an ice cream cake.  I'm not usually in the balloon release pictures but this year we decided to bring a tripod.  We went to a field by our house that we have used in the past but there were some people there already so we called my friend and asked if we could use her field and then she so kindly came out and took pictures for us and I'm grateful to have some pictures to document this day.