All choked up

Well, we're all done.

It's official and irrevokable- Andrew's ours! We were sealed in the Mount Timpanogos temple on Friday, December 28th. It was such an incredible experience and everyone seemed to be especially benign and congenial there. Of course, sympathy could have been inspired by the constant sniffles and errant black tears, but we'll take kindness on a special day (or heck, any day) regardless of the motivation.

Funny how trivial things unravel a string of others. Just walking the kids into the temple youth center brought home my own walk into another temple nursery some 32 years prior. I remembered so clearly all the ladies in white, several cribs, the layout of the room, and many coloring books. (But, most of all, i remember being bored - my parents had endowments to do at the same time and they were of the old school variety!)

What I don't remember was the actual sealing. I'm surprised because, of course, that's all I'll recall about this one- What a moment. They were so beautiful in their spotless white ensembles: Morgan in her frosted pearl floor-length dress, and Bubba in a dwarfed replication of Dad's white shirt and tie. They were wreathed in smiles- even Andrew. He was exquisite; they had brought him straight from napping, his little red cheeks and clear blue eyes contrasting with his creamy porcelain skin and the snowy white of his gown. He put his hand on ours and kept it there throughout the sealing, looking from Leroy to me and back again for the duration. Near the end, he gave me a luminous, delighted grin- which set me off into the 'ugly' cry. (You know, the one where you can't contain your lip twitch, your face crumples like a wad of paper, and black rivers stream down your face.) Fortunately, I was otherwise engaged and didn't care until later.

Regardless, the moment was sublime. It still seems like a picture in a children's book, but rather than some anonymous faces caricatured there, they're ours.

Although we weren't able to get our group together in the traditional group foto posed before the temple, the sisters did get permission for a brief all white pic of our family outside. Which I don't have yet, it being held without bail or parole on Dad's camera until the sentence is served and is freed from it's dark Canon detention center. Talk about cruel and unusual. The moment of its release, you can be assured of a media frenzy by numero uno.

Until then, I recline in blissful and utter relaxation to collect and compose myself ... but the alarm goes off, and chaos reigns again. We're back from the Magic Kingdom. And I don't mean Disneyland.