We’ve been here in Arizona for a bit over two weeks. Tomorrow morning we’ll pack up and head north to arrive in Pocatello on February 18th with an intermediate stop in St. George. We’ve had a very nice visit here with Jaelene and her family.

We were here a year ago December when Madeline was born and it’s been delightful to get to know her again a year later. She has a very independent personality and pretty much has everyone here “wrapped around her finger”. (I had to look up the “wrapped around the little finger” idiom. It comes from the idea that the ‘wrapper’ and the ‘wrappee’ have a loving, doting relationship and that the little finger, being the weakest finger, shows the relationship is not threatening, menacing, or subservient in any way.)

Lady M loves to eat. She can put away significant amounts of food, particularly fruit, and specifically blueberries. In the picture to the left, Madeline is busy consuming the strawberries that Nina is chopping up for her almost as fast as Nina can deliver them to her high chair tray.

There are three temples in the greater Phoenix area: the Mesa Temple, the Phoenix Temple, and the Gilbert Temple. We’ve done a session at the Mesa temple in a past visit. So, we decided it would be nice to do a session in the other two temples.

The Phoenix Temple is on the far north side of Phoenix, about an hour away from where our motor home was parked in Mesa, Arizona. It has a few sessions in the morning and a few sessions in the evening, so we decided to go there first for the 9am session. It was a beautiful, bluebird day (as most of them are here) and the temple itself was just beautiful itself. I was expecting it to be more along the size of the smaller temples because it was next to a Stake Center. It is, in fact, somewhere in between with a lovely light-green toned interior and an oval Celestial Room. It was one of the few temples we’ve been in with no central chandelier in the Celestial Room, but with four smaller chandeliers. The session was well attended and we enjoyed our time there.

We drove from the Phoenix Temple directly to the Gilbert Temple which is located on the west side of the valley. It took about an hour and a half to drive there in the middle of the day with light traffic on the expressways.

This is a larger temple with four endowment rooms. It is also a very beautiful temple. In fact, I’ve not seen an LDS  temple that isn’t beautiful! We arrived at 12:30, changed clothes, and went right into the 12:45pm session. This was not as well attended as the session in the Phoenix Temple earlier that day. However, It was very enlightening to attend two different temples, with two different endowment presentations on the same day. Definitely a learning and pondering experience! The chandelier in the Celestial Room is definitely breathtaking. We left our motor home at 7:15 am and arrived at Jaelene’s after the Gilbert Temple session at 3:45 pm. Eight hours devoted to the temple. I’d say that was eight hours well spent!

Of course, we had to also take a selfie at each temple and post them to Facebook. Jaelene commented that I needed a “selfie stick” because my arms aren’t long enough. That my arms aren’t long enough is definitely true, but I don’t want to carry something else with me! So, these arms are just going to have to do.

I’ve also been to two movies in the big-screen movie theaters in the two weeks we’ve been here. Both of them movies that I wasn’t sure they’d be still in first-run theaters when we got back from India and arrived in Arizona. The first was the last of the Hobbit movies. Casey hadn’t seen it either, so we went last Saturday. The other was The Imitation Game, the movie about Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine. Austin and Jackson went with me to see that movie. I thoroughly enjoyed both movies … it would be difficult to find two movies more different, however!  Alan Turing’s suicide, or actually the British culture and environment that lead up to his suicide, certainly robbed us of a brilliant man and what he might have accomplished.

We’ve had a great visit with Jaelene, Casey, and family. We’ve also had some very fun meals. Last night’s fondu dinner was definitely a highlight, however! It was Casey’s first time with fondu and he’s definitely a convert. When we lived in Chardon, Ohio (several lifetimes ago) we fondu’d fairly often, probably because we had lots of young people around the house who were eager to chop things up to get ready for fondu. It is definitely a preparation-labor-intensive dinner but makes for a great conversation time around the table. The chocolate fondu at the end was a hit with everyone, including Lady M (who rules the roost around here).