Aleky Gets Baptized

Aleky has chosen to be baptized and become a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We are so proud of his him. He has been looking forward to getting baptized for some time now, especially since his birthday earlier this month. 

Aleky put together an amazing program for his baptism. He asked Michelle to give a special talk on Baptism and Bishop Nelson to give a talk on the Holy Ghost (unfortunately the Bishop got ill so we asked our former home teacher, Brother Norman Thurston to give this talk). Sister Arnolene Anderson agreed to play the piano for the hymns and for the musical number which was performed by all 6 of the Jones boys. The Jones boys sang the Fourth Article of Faith and Army of Helaman. Grandma Sondra Jones and Grandpa David Petersen gave the prayers. Other supporting people included Susan Larabee as chorister, Jason Brooks presided and conducted the service, and Grandpa Jones and Grandpa Petersen were witnesses for the baptism. I was privileged to perform both the baptism and the confirmation of Aleky.

The Spirit was very strong as we listened to the talks, sang many hymns and songs, and listened to the confirmation and blessing being performed.  I was especially touched as my boys sang their musical number, Army of Helaman. I know that 6 boys isn't an army, a platoon maybe, but the potential faith and miracles that these boys represent really touched me. It is only a few more years before these boys will be scattered around the world to teach the gospel and bless lives and soon they will be baptizing others. And I am so grateful that I have the opportunity to be their father and that I have this time to help them get their spiritual legs under them before they are off and running to save the world.

We are certainly grateful to the many family and friends who were able to join us to witness Aleky getting baptized. 

After Aleky's baptismal service concluded we had a small luncheon and birthday celebration. We had previously held a small birthday celebration with cake and ice cream on his birthday but we made him wait to receive his presents because they were all related to getting baptized and becoming a member of the Church. So after lunch we had another cake, sang "Happy Birthday" and opened presents.

(Aleky opening presents)

(Aleky's Pumpkin Cakes)

(Singing Happy Birthday and blowing out candles)

(Aleky and Great Grandma Barrus)

(Aleky with Grandma & Grandpa Petersen and his new CTR ring!)

Congratulations Aleky! You've started on the right path back to our Heavenly Father. We love you.

Surprise Visit From Elder Jensen

What a hectic morning...

There I was lying peacefully in my bed when I happened to look at the clock...6:53 am! While that isn't very early it happened to be just 7 minutes before my first meeting of the morning. And as happens when you discover your about to be late I received that adrenaline rush and jumped out of bed landing perfectly in front of my closet (almost). Actually I just jumped out of bed and began to hurriedly getting dressed.

I aroused Michelle as I hurried down the hall so that she could begin getting the rest of the family ready for church (it takes us that long to get ready for church in the morning). Somehow I managed to arrive just slightly late for my meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting I raced home to provide what little assistance I could to help the rest of the family get ready for church. As usual, Michelle had everyone ready and waiting, playing quietly in the living room. I swallowed a quick bite to eat, brushed my teeth (finally), and grabbed scriptures and church bag. In spite of our level of preparation we managed to arrived at church in time for the sacramental hymn.

As we walked in to our usual seat on the second row we noticed that there had been a change in our bishopric! The seat usually occupied by Brother Brienholt was by a distinguished looked gentleman that looked strangely familiar. We quickly took our seats. The hymn happened to be the hymn we have been practicing as a family this past week during our scripture reading in the morning, "God Loved Us, So He Sent His Son (Hymn #187).

Our boys sang the first verse of the hymn, sat quietly during the passing of the sacrament and then busied themselves playing games on our phones during the talks (presented by our new High Priest Group leadership). Each person shared a shortened talk obviously leaving time at the end of the meeting for our visitor, but having missed the announcements because we were late we had to wait until this mystery speaker was announced.

Finally it was announced that Elder Jay E Jensen of the Presidency of the Seventy would be our concluding speaker! No wonder he looked familiar!!! He shared some great thought is just a few minutes. The main idea that I received from his talk was the parable of the pearl and the box. This parable was originally related by Elder Boyd K Packer:

“The parable: A merchant man seeking precious jewels found at last the perfect pearl. He had the finest craftsman carve a superb jewel box and line it with blue velvet. He put his pearl of great price on display so others could share his treasure. He watched as people came to see it. Soon he turned away in sorrow. It was the box they admired, not the pearl.” (Boyd K. Packer, “The Cloven Tongues of Fire,” Ensign, May 2000, 7)

Elder Jensen then related several examples of how we, as church members "admire the box" instead of "the pearl." Several examples, as I remember them include the following: Boy scout camp and girls camp activities are the box, the spiritual experiences are the pearl. The church buildings are the box, the gospel is the pearl. The temple is the box, Jesus is the pearl.

After the closing prayer, an eloquent oratory by Michelle, we expected the chapel to rush our position on the second row to shake the hand of this visiting General Authority. Surprising, we were not stampeded and we took advantage of our position to let each boy (except Quinten) to shake Elder Jensen's hand. After shaking the hands of the three speakers Elder Jensen came down from the stand and stopped at our row as we were trying to clean-up and repack our things.

Elder Jensen had some nice things to say to us as he surveyed our five boys and related his experience, having had 4 boys and 2 girls of his own and more than a dozen grand baby boys. He then asked my name and gave me a hug. It was a special experience to have those few special moments with someone of such spiritual stature. Both Michelle and I were able to feel a special spirit this morning.

Apparently Elder Jensen was originally scheduled for a large area training for the Eastern United States. But due to excessive snow those member's church meetings had been cancelled, freeing up Elder Jensen's Sunday. He had intended to visit a Spanish Ward in our area (not our stake) only to discover they were having ward conference. And having been acquainted with a previous stake presidency and thus being somewhat familiar with our ward/stake building he decided to visit us instead. We certainly feel blessed that the Lord would go through such great lengths to guide this servant to our ward to visit with me and my family (I'm just sure that's exactly why it happened...).

Regardless of the reasons or circumstances, this was a truly wonderful surprise visit from Elder Jensen. Once we got home we pulled out the recent Conference Ensign and showed the boys a picture of Elder Jensen and we had the opportunity to explain the various levels of church leadership (based on the row their picture happened to be in). What a fabulous Sabbath day.

Ward Activity - Fall Festival

Our ward had a fall festival this year instead of trying to compete with Halloween. We have to express our appreciation to all of those people who worked so hard to put this activity together. They did a fabulous job and I think everyone had a great time.

The evening started in the third quarter of the BYU-SDSU football game with the score tied 21-21. But notwithstanding, there was still quite a decent turn-out. We did notice a few of the brethren who disappeared somewhere in the fourth quarter. Their faithful attendance (at least in spirit) to the football game proved enough to claim our school's 500th win (38-28 final score).

Our fall festival started out with the pot-luck dinner. The ward provided the hot dogs and hamburgers and the members provided chips, salads, and desserts. With ample time to eat the activities started around 6:45 pm. The booths that they had included the photo booth, face painting, fishing pond, ring toss, pumpkin derby, bowling and basketball shoot. Also included, but not as booths, were the largest/smallest pumpkin, bottling and pie eating contests.

Here we are at the photo booth. While this was the first booth, it also happened to be our last stop of the evening.

Our friends, the Andersons, were also there for a quick photo opp. at the same time.

Face painting was the boys first stop of the evening after "eating" dinner. While they had been talking about it all week, when the time arrived Aleky was the only one brave enough to get something painted on his face.

After seeing the courage of his little brother, David also summoned the courage to have a spider web painted on his face.

At the end of the evening Donovan finally mustered the courage to have a blue star painted on his forehead. I'm not sure he had fully recovered from the shock of the experience...

Eleanor also finally decided to have her face painted and she got a "bug on the face." While the whole experience wasn't thrilling, she survived and was very excited to see the picture of the butterfly on her cheek.

Another wonderful masterpiece from the Young Women artists (Sister Brienholt). It was too cute to pass up without taking a picture.

The primary's fishing pond was fun as each kid got to go fishing twice. Apparently there were enough "fish" for everyone to get two tries and each kid was success (on almost every cast).

Aleky's favorite stop of the whole evening was the young men's ball toss. He thought that he had died and gone to heaven. He just tossed the balls into the tubes and if anyone missed he was there to help on the rebound.

Michael finally got his turn to go bowling but it didn't quite go as planned. May be we need to let him practice a few more tosses before our next fall festival.

This pumpkin derby was an interesting race. You quickly built a "car" and place a small pumpkin on top (strapping it one with rubber bands) and then you race them down the ramp. My pumpkin came in 4th. I guess I need to work on my pumpkin aerodynamic designs for next year.

Michelle really wanted a piece of pie for dessert. However, all of the pies were being used for the pie eating contest. So she entered. While she didn't win she did get her piece of pie.

Michelle also dominated the bottling contest. The rules were simple, bring one of your bottles with the number of total bottles prepared this year and the biggest number wins. Unfortunately, the word got around the ward that Michelle had really gone to town and so there were only a limited number of entries (why try when you don't stand a chance?). Michelle won 1st place and Autumn Bosley won 3rd place. Samantha Anderson won 2nd place but wasn't there for the picture.

Brother Jaccard wrapped up the evening with story time. He did a great job for the 3 minutes we were there. But the boys were more excited playing with the balls from the various booths that they weren't too concerned about the story. It took us the whole story just to round them up.
We all had fun. BYU won. What more could you ask for on a beautiful Saturday evening?

Final Bottling Party

Today was the final bottling party for our ward. While these parties have been fantastic and these woman have worked miracles, it has still been a long process, long days and I'm grateful that they are done for this year's bottling season.

This particular bottling party was focused on grapes! There are several families in our ward that have grape vines and wanted to learn how to bottle grape juice. While 2 different processes were used the steamer was the more efficient process and seemed to process the quickest.

Here Michelle is explaining the way to prepare the grapes for process. A quick rinse/wash and strip the grapes from the vines and put them in the strainers.

(This is a grape...)

This was the first wave of women to arrive at the party and they were put straight to work getting the grapes ready. We had some more apples as well so a second table was set up to prepare apples for bottled slices and applesauce.

We ended up with 6 stoves fired up simultaneously to process the grape juice as quickly as possible. (It certainly goes much faster with 6 stoves instead of just one!)

Once the juice was ready they drained the juice put it in bottles. The did the applesauce and slices processing on different stoves at the same time. It still took until after 5:00 pm to finish the processing and clean up the bottling tools and stoves.


After the three bottling parties these woman bottled over 300 quarts of fruit:

Apple Sauce - 64.5 quarts
Apple Slices - 46.75 quarts
Pears - 83 quarts
Nectarines - 55 quarts
Peach Jam - 12.75 quarts
Plum Jam - 2 quarts
Grape Jam - 3.75 quarts
Grape Juice - 42 quarts
White Grape Juice - 9 quarts

Total: about 320 quarts (80 gallons)!

General Conference Weekend

We had a wonderful conference weekend. Our boys were spectacular, beyond our best hopes and dreams. I'm not sure exactly how we did it but our boys sat through 3 1/2 sessions of conference and were nearly quiet and reverent the entire time!

While the boys weren't in the mood for a nice picture (we tried about 5, this was the best one) you can see our elaborate scheme for ultimate concentration during each conference session. We used conference bingo! In front of each boy is a bingo card with various gospel topics in random placements. Since each boy got to use money it really helped to keep their attention. Last conference we tried cheerios and jelly beans the boys lost interest after they at all of the food. It's a little harder to swallow pennies.


We set it up where the boys would get a treat for the first two bingos and then they had to clear their cards and try for a blackout in order to get the next treat (which was virtually impossible!). The boys really wanted those treats so they paid attention and would catch even the mention of a gospel topic listed on their cards. Aleky wasn't really interested but none of the boys would play with him so he just hung out with the family.

It was like magic! The boys finally ran out of enthusiasm for conference bingo during the middle of the 5th session on Sunday afternoon! We couldn't have been happier or felt more blessed than to have our 4 young children pay attention to the entire 2 days of general conference! With our boys focused on conference Michelle and I were able to concentrate as well and felt that this was a wonderful and much needed spiritual recharge. The talks were amazing and truly inspired. We are grateful to all of the Lord's servants who participated in the conference and have blessed our lives.

Bottling Party (part 2)

Today was yet another day for bottling the fruit collected from within the ward boundaries; the second of 3 scheduled bottling parties. By the end of today we estimated that we have bottled nearly 500 pounds of fruit that would otherwise have simply been wasted but is now preserved and ready to be used by happy families through out the coming year.

In preparing for today we were able to use 7 stoves and they would all be in use for the majority of the day.
We had about a dozen different people come to participate in the activity to help prepare, slice, dice and in all other ways get the fruit ready for bottling and processing.

Today's emphasis was on apples. We did apple sauce and apple slices in great abundance.

It was really quite the production. Fortunately we had the use of Dad Petersen's wall tent frame and tarp to provide some shade from the summer sun.

Around lunch time Saundra had prepared sandwiches for everyone who had been participating. I don't know how she made them but they were bagel dogs (hot dogs cooked inside of bagel doe. (I definitely need to get the recipe...for Michelle!)

We are certainly grateful to everyone who helped to process so much fruit and especially for the few who stayed to the bitter end (clean-up). We love to host these parties but sometimes the clean-up can really be a chore.

Fortunately we had enough help that we were done by 5:00 pm. That gave Michelle just enough time to jump in the shower and get ready to go to Women's Conference at 6:00 pm.

Recuerdos de mi Pueblo

My first assignment on the High Council was to give a talk in my assigned ward the next week. After that I took over planning and running our stake cultural activity, "Recuerdos de mi Pueblo".

It took was quite the project and I didn't have a lot of time to coordinate all of the various aspects of the activity. I was fortunate to be able to work with some very dedicated activity chairs from the various wards in the stake. With their help we were able to put together an exciting cultural event.

We had each ward contribute a poster about a different country that talked about how the church has progressed in that country. We also were able to get several flags representing most of the countries in North and South America.

During the pre-show time we had an activity for the kids. We had 2 pinantas that we hoisted up on the basketball standard and let the kids hit it. We started off just letting the little kids hit. Then we graduated to big kids with a blind fold. Finally we allowed the big kids to just swing because the pinantas were not breaking. It proved to be very entertaining and we managed to get most of the kids some candy (one way or the other).

The actual performance, "Recuerdo de mi Pueblo" is done by a group of performers from around the area. Brother Cenobio Valderrama put this show together and was "touring" around to various stakes in this Utah South area. We were very fortunate to have this production in our stake. The show consisted of song, dance, magic and cultural explanations.

We estimated that we had nearly 500 people attend this performance. Everyone there seemed to enjoy the production and had a good time. We were excited to note that there were at least a dozen non-member participants in attendance as well.

After the performance was over we cleared the chairs and had a Latin dance for a couple more hours. Even though it was supposed to be a family dance, most of the families went home to put their kids to bed. We still had over 100 people at the dance.


It was a wonderful opportunity to participate in this production. Our hope was to have an experience that would allow people to interact and provide some missionary moments. As far as I can tell we were able to accomplish both objectives. It's too early to say whether we will try this activity again as a stake but it was a great experience for me to coordinate a large activity at the stake level. It'll be interesting to see what I get to experience next.

Relief Society Bottling Party

One day, not so long ago, my dear wife was talking with Samantha Anderson. Now that isn't so shocking but on this particular day they happened upon an idea! This idea was to gather the fruit in the ward (that would normally just fall to the ground and be wasted) and bottle it and actually utilize it productively. This fruit could be gathered freely.

But this wasn't just about gathering the free fruit. This was an opportunity to teach those sister who were interested how to bottle that fruit so they could do it on their own the next time. And so the idea began to develop. Each person who heard the idea was inspired and excited to further the effort. Eventually Michelle, Samantha and Lydia (Taylor) began the organization of this bottling party. Word was put out to gather canning and bottling equipment, camp stoves, tables, bottles, lids, fruit, etc.

Every day this week something new has arrived, either fruit, bottles or other canning equipment. We were forced to (partially) clean out our garage to make room for everything. Then, the night before the canning party Michelle took me aside and gave me some very specific instructions about what I was supposed to be doing before, during and after this bottling party. As an afterthought she asked me if I'd be willing to help out!!!

Fortunately I was mostly in charge of the kids. I like that part. Especially when they decided that they wanted to play with each other. However, I was called upon frequently to move large boiling pots of water, steaming hot applesauce, etc. as needed.

The kids getting in some playtime...

It wasn't hard to find fruit testers...



And more playing...


The bottling party is just getting started. Note, only two stoves to begin with. We ended up with 10 burners going simultaneously!
The first step was taking care of the apples. At this point we had lots of big helpers.
The nectarines were started simultaneously as more sisters arrived.
Getting the bottles ready for fruit.

Then it was time for peaches.
Once the apples were ready it was time to squoosh them into applesauce.
Still more nectarines...
And apples...
There is an art to putting the fruit into the bottles to maximize the space.
More bottles to prep
But look at all that applesauce
Instructions and teaching moments were frequent


And here is the whole set-up. The canopy for preparing the fruit, the cooking on the patio (10 burners fired up and we could have used more!). The grass was the washing/cleaning area.
Making some jam

Finally processing for the finished fruit bottles And finally time to clean up

This was quite the process but it yielded some great results. These ladies bottled about 120 quarts of fruit...
Applesauce: 19 quarts and 18 pints
Pears: 22 quarts
Nectarines: 54 quarts and 2 pints
Peach jam: 17 pints and 16 half pints
Plum jam: 4 pints

We're lucky enough to be planning "round 2" in about 3 weeks. It was really quite the production but everyone seemed to have an enjoyable time, learned about bottling and came away with 120 quarts of free fruit! But the best part of the whole day was having 2 investigators come and participate in the bottling project! What a great introduction to the church and one of the ways the gospel blesses our lives.