A Thing of Beauty

 I come from a family of surprisers.  My parents and siblings love to do the unexpected and especially love to plan surprise visits.   They're not as common anymore now that there are lots of kids involved, but there was a time when "dropping in" for a visit, despite living thousands of miles away, was a semi-regular occurrence.    When you've been surprised a lot though, it makes you pretty hard to surprise.  

This past week,  however, our youngest daughter completely and totally surprised us with this beautiful gift she'd been working on for weeks. 

It's a painting she's been working on  in her art class.  She based it on this photo--one of our favorites--from our trip to Uganda.      

It literally took my breath away and I'm still in awe that a child of mine had the artistic capacity to capture such beauty and emotion.   Now we just need to find a place to get it framed...

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“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before.”  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Christmas Surprise

My kids got some weird presents this year....

Can you guess what it all means?   It took them a few minutes to figure it out (the order is important).   Scroll down when you're ready to see the answer....

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Ham + L + 2000 lbs. (more commonly known as a "ton")

Ham-L-ton

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We're going to see Hamilton in NYC in October!!!!     

And we all  couldn't be more excited about it!   

More Surprises

You may have noticed that we have a thing for surprises in our family. My sister Heather has "dropped by" from Minnesota unexpectedly on a long weekend. Matt surprised my parents by showing up unexpectedly from DC with a serious girlfriend (now wife) in tow. Even my parents have been known to pull a few fast ones over on us kids (probably where we got it from) like the time when they woke us all up from a sound sleep and we thought it was morning, but it was really the middle of the night and it was high time we learned to do our chores correctly.

So naturally with all these surprising precedents in our family, we didn't think that all 8 of us kids randomly showing up in Utah a month after his 60th birthday was quite enough of a shock to his system. We went for shock and awe of the adjust your blood pressure medication variety.

The next day after we arrived, we contrived to get a couple of the boys to take Dad out to lunch while the rest of us got busy setting up mountains of food for his big SURPRISE PARTY!

When I say "mountains of food", I mean MOUNTAINS....

Side note: If you ever want to butter me up for some big favor sometime, those pink sprinkled cookies should do the trick just fine.


Then we started filling the house with family and friends.....

and waited for Dad's big entrance....

We got him good...again! (he was a little more reserved in his reactions this time, but he was shocked nonetheless)

We did have a little scare there that things were going to get ugly when my Dad almost refused the hug of his good friend who dared enter into Cougar territory with a U of U shirt...


We also got pretty nervous when Nate insisted on putting the full 60 candles on the cake...

But we were able to escape calling the fire department and Dad was able to overcome his phobia for a second to finish the hug...


Afterwards a bunch of them went off to watch the BYU vs. FSU game...

which was *almost* enough to ruin the fun of the rest of the day with its disappointing outcome, but it's hard to keep a group of Crains down for long....

To be continued with tales of our family pictures, Settlers of Catan raucousness, and a G-rated discussion on circumcision vs. castration for my sister.

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