Merrody's Project

My parents have been serving a mission in Panama for about a year now.  The village where they live has a little orphanage in it where they keep malnourished kids until they get healthy and can be sent back to their parents.  It is called "Nutre Hogar" or "Home of Nourishment".  It's a great program.  When we heard that my brother was going to be taking his family to visit my parents, and that they were planning to do some service at Nutre Hogar, Merrody wanted to get involved too.

So we bought some fabric.

Merrody cut, pinned and sewed the fronts to the backs. (No batting needed--it's too hot in Panama!)

 

In all, she made 15 quilts!

She packed them all up and mailed them to Uncle Joel to be taken to Panama.

My parents and Joel's family delivered the blankets to Nutre Hogar.

She received a sweet thank you letter in response:

It says, "Dear Merrody,

The children at Nutre Hogar Las Tablas thank you profoundly for your donation.  The blankets are very pretty.  You make them very well.

We hope you can visit us some day.

May God bless you.

Hugs"

It was such a meaningful experience for Merrody.  She's a good girl!

In other news:

 

 

Halloween 2014

 Most years, we try to host my close siblings for Thanksgiving.  This year, however, two of my sisters are due to have babies in November, so we switched our family party to Halloween.  It was so fun!  First, the costumes:

Norah was a princess.

 Jack was a mad scientist.  He had so much fun making a bubbling mixture to go with his costume!

 Hazel was the tooth fairy.

Henry was a tooth.

 Merrody was a dentist.

 And Joel was a burglar.

 Here they are all together.

 We had to take a few more on Halloween night with the cousins:

 Whitney's family dressed up as bikers.

 I'm not sure who Matt was supposed to be, but I'm pretty sure some people thought this was his real look when he took the kids trick-or-treating!

 Heather is living proof that Mom's genes are alive and well.  She insisted on buying matching outfits for all of the girls from the dollar clearance rack at Walmart!

 Funny story:  Mom kept emailing us all weekend wanting to know what was going on and what she was missing.  And one point, I used the voice app to send an email from my phone.  I mentioned that the women had made burlap wreaths.  Of course, the phone changed it to "burlap briefs"!  Mom's response was, "Burlap Briefs?  I'm afraid I need a picture and please--just hold them up they don't have to be on the person".  Silly Mom!  She said she was relieved when she found out her daughters hadn't been making homemade underwear!

In other fall news: