Royal Wedding

For as long as I can remember, Crystal has said that she will have a Royal Wedding Party when Prince William gets married.  (this is after she moved on from thinking she would be his bride) haha
Since she's just had a baby I volunteered to host the festivities at my house.  Nakita made awesomely posh invites, Kelly and I made a 3 tier wedding cake, we drank from tea cups, ate cucumber sandwiches and scones with jam & cream, wore tiaras, facinators and gloves, giggled and cheered, waved British flags and stayed up til 12:30 to watch THE kiss which turned into 2 kisses! 

Dad

We were at The Night Glow when Crystal phoned me to say an e-mail had come from Dad asking us to watch conference in the morning.  We knew it meant something was going to happen cos we recieved the same e-mail last year when Dad was called to the 8th Quorom of the Seventy as an Area Authority.
We woke up early and watched it live with Paul and Nakita.  We were suprised to hear Dad released as an area authority and then even more suprised to hear him called to the First Quorom of the 70 as a General Authority.  It was so cool to see him walk up to the stand and take his seat with the other members of the quorom.  It is a stand I have looked at every General Conference since I was a little girl - and now OUR Dad sits there!

He has been called for the next 13 years until he turns 70.  Their first assignment is to the Phillipines.  They leave August 1st and while we are sad that they are leaving we are so excited for this new calling.  They have already had some amazing experiences and I know that they will have many more.

Thankfully they get to come home every Christmas for a month to see us all.  And they will get to visit Wade's family every 6 months when they go to conference.  We are saving all our money so we can visit them as often as possible - which will probably not be very often but we will try!

Baby Mann

Baby Preston Samuel Mann arrived on March 26th at 5:25 in the afternoon.  Its a hard thing to watch your sister endure pain and exhaustion but Crystal was awesome and I was proud to be a part of the arrival of my new nephew.

We weren't really asleep - we were just being silly while Crystal was having a nap
(AFTER the epidural kicked in of course!)



Ryan hanging out with his new cousin



Elle loves looking after Preston - only 2 more years til she can legally look after him by herself!







Koromatua School Triathlon

Elle and Ryan had their school triathlon a couple of weeks ago and it was a great day.  Training began a few weeks before both at school and at home.

Elle competed individually, completing a course which involved 6kms of cycling, 2 kms of running and 1 km of swimming.  She was awesome - it was a tough course but she kept on going and kept a really good pace.  She came 5th for her age group.

Ryan was the swimmer for his team and they came 1st for their age group!  He swam 1km in no time - using his favourite stroke - breast stroke.  The week before he had represented Koromatua School at the Waipa Inter-school swimming sports in Te Awamutu.  He placed third in his heat and 5th in the final!  Yay Ryan. 

The cousins:  Sarsha, Logan, Maddy, Elle & Ryan

So Proud of This Girl:

Elle was chosen to be Head Girl of her school a couple of weeks ago.  It feels like just yesterday I was dropping her off for her first day of school.  If you'd told me back then that she would one day be the Head Girl I would have laughed.  She was so quiet and shy and HATED school.  After her first week she came home, rolled up into the foetal position on the couch and cried herself to sleep.  She stopped eating too.  It was quite horrific really.  She cried every day for months and it broke my heart.

But I guess somewhere along the way she learned to like school and grew out of her shyness.

After filling out an application and having a staff and student vote, Elle was chosen to be a House Leader.  Then a week later she called me from school to tell me they had announced she was head girl. 
She has lots of responsibilities to fulfill and we know she will do a great job of being a leader and an example to the other students.  In fact, I've already seen her in action.  I was at school during lunch time the other day to drop something off and a little 5 year old came up to Elle and told her she had no friends.  So Elle went and found some friends for her.  cute.

Great Lake Relay 2011

Last Saturday was the Great Lake Relay at Lake Taupo. It was an amazing experience to say the least.  When training began 6 weeks earlier I couldn't even run around the track at Church College.  Infact I only made it half way.  200 metres.  And then I died.  Literally.  But I had a goal and the fact that we trained as a team made it easier to stick to it and push myself.  Don't get me wrong, I hated it every single training run. But then when I finished I'd think "hey that wasn't so bad" and the next night I'd be out there again.
So race day came and I felt really ready.  My leg of the race was only 6.1 kms and was classed as easy.  It was a great feeling starting off and even passing a few people.  The first half of the run was cruisey as it was mainly downhill - I even managed a conversation with a man running beside me.  (yeah, I didn't know he was there and was singing really loud to my i-pod).  Then the hills started.  One of them was 900 metres long.  Yeah, that wasn't fun.  But I kept going and then finally I saw the van again and Jonathan gave me a drink and told me I only had 1.5kms to go.  I was like "yes - I'm nearly done"  But I kept running and running and no finish line came into sight.  I started to think I must be running really, really slowly for it to be taking so long.  At last I saw the changeover station which gave me a boost of energy and I was able to pass a few people.  I tagged Jonathan for the next leg and pretty much collapsed in the ditch on the side of the road.  haha.  I was wasted.

Yep, that's me in the ditch :)

Then the team told me  that the leg had been mis-measured and I had infact run 7.3 kms.  Holy Moly.  That probably doesn't seem like much, especially to people like Paul who ran 14 kms at 2am but for me that was a big deal.  The most I had ever run was 5.5 kms.  So yeah, I was pretty happy with that.  And I even managed to do it in less time than I was alotted for my 6.1 kms.
All in all it was a great day.  It was awesome to be part of such a great team of people.  Running over the finish line together was pretty cool.  We'd made a hair brained goal at a family feed a few months before and actually accomplished it!  It took us 15 hours and 26 seconds to run 156 kms. We came 109th.  Bring on next year!


THE RUNS
Back Row L-R:  Wally, Nigel, Jonathan, Paul, Rene, Sach
Front Row L-R:  Nakita, Kelly, Me, Sam, Kara, Asher



Valentines Day

Valentines Day was on Monday and I celebrated by getting up at 5:30 to cook breakfast for 12 teenagers...how romantic :)  But seriously, I had promised my Seminary class breakfast if they all passed off their scripture mastery and they all did! 

Don't you love my cake stand?  Jonathan got it for me for Christmas.

We had planned to go on a family picnic but were helping in the kitchen at Brother Cammocks funeral so postponed until Tuesday night.  Usually I would cook up scrumptuous picnic treats but now that I am an early morning seminary teacher and suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome :) I let the Colonel do the cooking.  No one seemed to mind.

Elle for some reason decided she officially hated KFC so had fish n chips instead