Our girlie's journey...

Last Fall our girlie was on cloud 9! She completed her Personal Progress Program and earned her Young Womanhood Recognition.

She brought balloons for the girls and leaders to release and showed a power point presentation of family, friends, and leaders to say 'thank you' for their help along her journey. Here are just a few of her slides...

This picture was taken by one of her awesome leaders.

 

Value Project for Faith

Value Project for Divine Nature - she totally loved camp even with its 72-hour weekly schedule (12 hours a day, 6 days a week). No sleepin' in during the summer.

Her Value Project for Individual Worth was to participate in the Stake Broadway Musical Review. We couldn't imagine how to fit the rehearsals into her schedule but she made it work and ended up with new friends and great memories.

Her Value Project for Knowledge was a cute scripture bag sewn out of a place-mat (it was her first project and she used that little bag all the time). By the time she finished all her projects that little bag was worn out and the decorative bow was all that was left of it.

Value Project for Choice and Accountability

Value Project for Good Works

Value Project for Integrity led her to being a two year Dance Company member. She's loved it!

Value Project for Virtue was to read the Book of Mormon. She's read it twice now and is on her third time. You gotta love the "good news!"

Another girls camp photo by her leader. Thanks Sister Welch!

She's now working to earn her "Honor Bee" and one of the requirements is to help others work on their Personal Progress. She's decided one of the people she's going to encourage is her good ol' mom!   :)

We love our girlie!!!  xoxo

It's an honor...

Our girlie had an experience to remember this week. She was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society. Our school has a beautiful induction ceremony that celebrates and informs about the aims of the NJHS.

We love the woman at the microphone. She has had a profound influence on our children's education over the past 9 years through Grade School and Jr. High School. She is a professional in every sense of the word.

"Five main purposes have guided chapters of NJHS from the beginning: to create enthusiasm for scholarship; to stimulate a desire to render service; to promote leadership; to encourage responsible citizenship; and to develop character in the students of secondary schools. These purposes also translate into the criteria used for membership selection in each local chapter."

The Branch Bros were in the NJHS too and in the National Honor Society. I'm grateful for this country, for this community. What great opportunities the twigs have been given to learn and serve, to become contributing citizens who make a difference in the lives of others just as these administrators and teachers make in their lives. It's an honor.

Duck hunting and cattail clouds...

To earn extra credit in Biology, our girlie was to photograph and identify ducks and geese in our area. That was the perfect excuse on our Christmas break, before the snow flew and the temperatures dropped below freezing, to go duck hunting. (It was a beautiful afternoon - no filters.)

 

We really had to hunt to find them! We didn't even know we'd seen northern shovelers till the pictures were on the computer and we could zoom in on these two. 

 The girlie caught these mallards in flight on a phone camera - nice timing girlie!

When I was little, my mom showed me how to explode cattails. It's a blast and the twigs love to do it as much as I do. My girlie and I were walking along this road, hunting for ducks, when the next thing we know Hunter had snagged some cattails and was having a heyday exploding them just upwind of us!

I was too busy screaming, laughing, and running from the clouds of cattail seeds to get a picture, but the remains of the cattail clouds were all over the road. Duck hunting with the twigs was my kind of "homework."

Pooh Bear's favorite day...

"What day is it?"
"It's today," squeaked Piglet.
"My favorite day," said Pooh.
-A.A. Milne

Well said, Pooh Bear.     :)

Two hands...

This exceptional girl is studying Music at a local University and was looking for audiences to practice her piano "finals" on before the real "finals" at school. We jumped at the chance to hear her play!

What a treat!

Just a little about this girl of whom I think the world, and if you know her I'll bet you agree! The following quote may have been written with her in mind.

“For Attractive lips, speak words of kindness.

For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.

For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.

For beautiful hair, let a child run their fingers through it once a day.

For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone.

People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms.

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself and the other for helping others.”
-Sam Levenson

Avoiding flashover...

We are blessed with many friends who have exceptional talent at baking and candy making! Not only that, they are generous and share their delicious treats.  Rachelle and Debbie gave us this for Christmas. Yum!   :)

Even the twigs' friends were into the baking and sharing, along with giving homemade glittery cards.     

  

The majority of us in our home don't have this talent. (Our girlie is the exception and loves to bake if she gets the time.) The rest of us are having a good day in the kitchen if we can avoid flashover. Just the other day while in the shower, I heard screams coming from Hunter and hysterical laughing coming from the girlie, then I thought I heard "Fire, Fire, Fire!" Thank Heaven the Mr. was home as Hunter was on the hunt for a fire extinguisher. The Mr. picked up the flaming toaster oven with hot pads and carried it out the front door.

Hunter was just warming up a tortilla...

Yup...it's a good day in our kitchen if we can avoid flashover...and extinguishers.

The twigs trump Moab with Temple Square...

The twigs wait with bated breath for this day to come each year. Yes, one would think I'm referring to Christmas but it's actually the Annual Stake Temple Square Clean-up Day. They even convinced us to give up our Moab vacation in October to be home for this event. We're pushovers for the twigs so we acquiesced and then had the great luck of being able to attend the Clean-up as well.

There was a huge gathering of people from all along the Wasatch Front to clean up beds and pull the summer/fall flowers, then get the beds ready for winter planting. What an operation!

This planter had been completely full of geraniums, parsley, dahlia's, etc. just an hour earlier.
 

We put the plants in garbage bags, then turned over and raked the soil. These handy dandy little trucks would carry our garbage to large dumpsters outside of Temple Square.

Our girlie had a good story about a little truck like this. She had been standing by a planter, opening a garbage bag, when she heard one of the people in charge ask for a volunteer. No one responded so they asked a second time. She's a little shy but was brave enough to speak up and say she'd help. Turned out they needed someone to ride along in the little truck, carrying the bags to the dumpsters. It was the job all the rest of us wanted. Kudos girlie, for speaking up!   :)

There was plenty of fun shenaniganizing going on too, like trying to put things in Hunter's hood. 

Friends helped me catch a snapshot or two.

 

After all the clean-up the kids got to have a pizza party. Good times!  :)

A kleptomaniac named Rascal...

When our first twig made his appearance and we were deciding on a name, I was all alone with my opinion.

I totally loved the name Rascal Striker Branch. What a fantastic name! C'est vrai? 

Yeah, no one else thought so either, which means I've been waiting 18 years to get my "Rascal." 

Recently, we added our new family member (HERE) and everyone agreed he looked like a Rascal!

He's a busy guy being a kleptomaniac of things he finds on beds, in trash cans, by bathtubs, in closets...

...if he's not got us playing "kick the tennis ball for me to chase 200 times a day 'cause I never ever get tired of chasing tennis balls 'cause I'm wonkers for tennis balls!" 

"Rascal" is the perfect name for this guy.   :)