Dear Kids,
      We had a lot of fun at Sunday dinner last week, but we didn’t realize it was an important day: Reggie’s birthday! He was 15, and we didn’t even celebrate. I realized it later that night. Speaking of which (dinner, not Reggie), I’ll be cooking Sunday dinner again on April 4th, at the cabin. It’s conference Sunday, and also Easter. Everybody is invited. If you want to stay over Friday or Saturday night, you can reserve a room by calling Donna or me. Dad and I are going to be sleeping in the bunk . . . oops, the agricultural shed. I don’t know if any bunks (oops, shelves) will be built by then, but the inside walls and ceiling are finished. It looks really good.
      My sugar and chocolate boycott only lasted eleven days. I got over the physical addiction after about a week, but I couldn’t handle the mental. It was terrible waking up in the morning and knowing I wasn’t going to have any chocolate all day long. I could have kept going, but I couldn’t figure out a good reason to keep torturing myself. So I quit. That first bite of chocolate tasted really good. (The dove dark that Vanessa gave me, closely followed by a Lindt truffle.)
      John was on a diet to lose 25 pounds, not because he looked fat, but because he was too heavy to fly his glider, if he took oxygen tanks. And without the tanks, he can’t go higher than 12,000 feet or so. In the meantime, he was advertising the glider for sale. You guessed it. After he lost 20 pounds, he sold the glider. He came to the cabin yesterday to give me my new glasses, and I showed him that Donna’s birthday cake was still out on the counter, and there was a big pail of ice cream in the freezer. (Don’t ask me why there was still cake and ice cream, five days after her birthday. In our house, it would have been long gone.) Well, you guessed the rest. We all tanked up on the cake and ice cream, and I think John enjoyed it the most of all.
      Paul just blew in. He’s on spring break, and on Wednesday he’s going to Farmington, New Mexico, to be fire-alarm certified for Texas. By the way, he’s going to Lubbock now, not San Antonio. At least it isn’t El Paso, he says.
      We had fast Sunday in the Lighthouse branch today, since last week was stake conference, and I got up my nerve to bear my testimony in Spanish. They have the custom of everybody going up to the stand at the start of testimonies, so you have to commit yourself at the beginning of the meeting. So I sat there on the stand, terrified, for the first 15 or 20 minutes. When it was my turn, and I started speaking, I was so scared my words all ran together. But then I looked around and saw all the different people I know, and realized they all wanted to hear what I was saying. So I relaxed and had a really good time. I’m sure I slaughtered their language, but they were all very nice afterwards.
      Life is good. I love you all! Mom