A haircut can do wonders...

Sariah wanted to do something different with her hair for her senior pictures and to mark the right-of-passage as she gets ready to leave for BYU. So she allowed me to take a couple of inches off the bottom the first hour and she wore it that way for a little while. “Okay,” says she, “now take a little more off it and I will see if I like that.” So out came the trusty scissors and off came another few inches until she was satisfied with the results.

I think she is very grown up and very sophisticated with her new “do”.

By Emily Dickenson - whom I love to read...

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The other side of the story.

This is a picture of my very own beginning of daffodil principle and they are blooming.

The other side of the story (from the blog below) is that some years ago there was a huge forest fire around the Bauer home and several thousand acres and homes were lost to the fire. Everyone thought “What a loss….the daffodils are gone!”

Then the next spring there they were poking through the blackened earth and amongst the skeleton blackened forest, acres and acres, all yellow and sunny and bringing cheer to many who had had such a loss during the previous summer.

You can now see Mrs. Bauer's garden as the Daffodil Garden in Running Springs, California, a commercial park that began all those years ago and brings so much pleasure each year.

The Daffodil Principle

Winter was so long this year, lasting into the middle of April and I was so tired of ice and snow that I began longing to be home in Australia by the beach (it was not the family I was longing to see at this time, but the sun.) and longing to see the daffodils which in Ohio herald the end of winter.

Then I heard about the “Daffodil Principle”. In 1958 a lady named Mrs. Bauer who lived in a very ordinary neat little farmhouse in the hills of California, surrounded by forest and farmland, began planting daffodils in her yard “one bulb at a time”. She continued to plant bulbs until 40 years later her daffodil garden covered over five acres of land and people would drive for miles to “see the daffodils bloom” at the beginning of spring.

Amazing what "one bulb at a time" can accomplish.

Prophet's Song

Some of your heritage

Here are the “Smylie Children” …Christina, Dinah, Andrew, Stephen, Shelley, Geraldine and Sharon (David Zajkovic was in Alice Springs), Summer of 2000 in Adelaide, Australia

Hurry, they are coming!!!!

The wedding is fast approaching and we have guests coming from all over the place and they are going to stay at our house. You have to understand, our house is under constant construction. These are pictures of Derick when he and Aria took on the task of our bathroom during last summer. We still only have one bathroom, but at least it will be a nice cleanly plumbed-and-painted one. You can see why Ariana thinks he is a keeper.

We have also been doing up Sariah’s bedroom which has been “early getto” style since Ariana was a teenager and I decided it was about time she had a “real” room (now that she is about to move out!). But Sariah also took this on as part of her YW project for her medallion and it is coming along nicely. Only problem, we could not get the bed up the stairs, the doorway was not wide enough in this old house, so we may have to take out the window to get the bed into her room. Ooooh Derick!!!!!
But plaster and paint and all, we are all getting excited and scared at the same time for the time of the wedding is fast approaching and it will be so nice to visit with all the guests (and get some of these projects finished) :) :)

Sariah rocks!!!!!!

She did it! Sariah was given a full (2) year scholarship to the local college (Edison) where Ariana is going right now. She will have a second year if she keeps her grades up, which she will do I am sure. She will still go to BYU for the summer and if her finances, grades and desires workout she will stay there, but if not she can come home and have her schooling paid for locally. She wants to get out into the world and I cannot blame her, but she also feels that living at home saves some money and with the cost of schooling in the US, the decision to stay locally for the first couple of years has its advantages. Anyway, congratulations my darling, you worked hard for this.

Warts and All

I have had a wart on my finger for years and have been trying to remove it recently with this wart remover chemical burn stuff that is highly toxic to my olfactory nerves and would get me high with five good wiffs. Anyway there is something that I want to add to the family blog about warts.

I have lived away from the core Smylie family for well over half of my life, (no comments on how old I am please), but somehow I was always secure. I don’t know how Mum and Dad made us feel this way. I do not know what secret formula they came across and injected into our everyday life. But somehow they gave each of us (all 8 brothers and sisters) the confidence that we could do anything and go anywhere and be secure in being loved.

Well, perhaps that was it!

Perhaps just knowing that we are loved was the key.

We were taught not only that they loved us, but that the Lord loved us and that we should love life, love music, love books, love our ourselves and this good earth the Lord has given us, so that when we went out on our own that love would give us confidence that no matter who should see our warts (and we all have them in some form) we would know that we had tasted love and were okay having others see our faults.

I feel truly blessed to be a part of a wonderful family, warts and all.