Christmas Part 5: The Sunday After Christmas

Dan, Coda and I spent the night at Paul and Denise's, and woke up to get ready to sing in their Church Ward. While getting ready, I overheard the family watching "Music and the Spoken Word," where their dad (Paul) sings in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This program is played live every Sunday morning. I thought it was neat that even after their dad being in Motab for I think 2 years, they still got up and tuned in on Sunday mornings. Paul isn't often caught on film when the Motab sings, but they were looking for him anyway! I thought it was very sweet.

Shan, Kaitlyn, Rob, Pauls, Denise, their children, the Furse's, and Julie (Megan's mom), and Dan and I sang "Jesu the Very Thought of Thee" for the ward special music number, and then sat down among the congregation. Shannon and I sat next to each other and whispered incredibly witty remarks, the secrets of eternal youth, comments on Devin's paper "Optimization of a Numerical Model of Three Dimensional Heat Transfer During Friction Stir Welding of 304L Stainless Steel," and other fascinating things to each other throughout Sacrament.

After Sacrament Shan, Dan, and I went to Stan's and took some soup in hand, heated it up in a pan (actually a microwave but for poetic purposes allow me some liberties), then off to the couch we ran, and watched Julie and Julia again (at least for Shannon the "again" kind-of applies--she had watched the first third of it already).

We then all took naps, and awoke to yummy ham sandwiches, celebrating Paul and Devin's birthdays, and trying to out-laugh the other room. The adults laughed so loud, so us young adults and kids fauz-laughed much louder. Then the adults laughed even louder. Then we tried to out-do them but it turned into clapping and shrieking, and yeowling like cats in heat.

At night we played "Reverse Charades", where an entire team of people try to act out a phrase and only one person on their team guesses what phrase. Some fun phrases of the night: Proctology, Astronaut (to which my team pointed to Megan's Dad, who is an astronaut, in effort to get me to say the right word and to which I blurted out "Bald!" instead), Taxidermy (the room proceeded to cut open and stuff Coda and Fergie), etc. Endless fun.

But it had to end. Dan & I felt lonely being the only two people in our home that night after spending 4 days with 20 plus McGuires. I had to say goodbye to Shannon, who is returning to Boston where she attends Law School (and is the top 20% I will add!). Coda had to say goodbye to Fergie, and who knew dogs could cry? We had to leave all the McGuires but not before setting our next date for February!