Busy Bee Summer Social

We had a wonderful evening with delicious food and visiting!  Thanks to Cherie Mull and the RS Mtgs Committee, the Hansen's for sharing their beautiful backyard with us, and all who helped bring food!

Funeral Services for Jacob Randall

Viewing Friday March 2nd 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Highland East Stake Center

4679 W. 11000 N.

Highland, UT 84003

Family Prayer, Saturday March 3rd 10:45 am

Highland East Stake Center

4679 W. 11000 N.

Highland, UT 84003

Funeral Services, Saturday March 3rd 11:00 am

Highland East Stake Center

4679 W. 11000 N.

Highland, UT 84003

Burial, Saturday March 3rd 3:00 pm

Logan City Cemetery

951 North 1200 East

Logan, UT 84321

Gratitude Fireside

'Weave a tapestry of gratitude throughout your life'. We had a wonderful evening as sisters Thursday night. Brooke Severts, Anne Ieremia, Felicia Pimentel, Ruth King and Iretta Mahalko shared their thoughts on gratitude in there lives. We had a beautiful musical number, and delicious refreshments. Thanks to all who helped make this a wonderful evening!

Super Saturday

We had a really great Super Saturday! Thanks to all the RS activities committee and the teachers for all the hard work they did to make this day a success! A special thanks to Cherie for all she did to make this a super day!

RS Picnic Social

Just want to share our cute poster that Juleen Sears did for our social. She is the one behind the scenes who makes all our cute posters and invitation/fliers! Thanks Juleen!

RS Picnic Social

We had a really fun picnic social Thursday night! Allison shared some thoughts on friendships, and we did a couple activities to get to know each other better. Thanks to everyone who helped, and those who brought salads and desserts! It all tasted so good!

RS Birthday Celebration

Thursday, March 10th was our RS Birthday Celebration. We had a wonderful dinner, and our special guest speaker was Anita Stansfield. She shared with us Emma Smith's story. We all gained a greater love and appreciation for the remarkable women that Emma was. Anita also inspired us to be prayerful to be in the right place, at the right time, so we can fulfill our promises made in heaven. It was a very special evening. Thanks to all who helped make this a memorable evening!

Navajo Taco Cooking Class

We had a wonderful evening on Thursday! Ronnalynn Dean taught a fun class on making Navajo Tacos! We learned how to use our beans and rice from our food storage and learned different ways to cook beans. Ronnalynn shared with us her fried bread recipe:

3C. flour (can do 1 1/2 white and 1 1/2 wheat)
1 TBS baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 C. milk
1 C. warm water

Combine dry ingredients in mixing bowl. Add milk, stir thoroughly. Add water in small amounts (thirds). Knead dough until soft but not sticky. Cover bowl and let stand for 15 minutes. Pull off large egg size balls of dough. On floured surface, roll into circles about 1/4 in thick. Poke a hole in the center of each hole.

In a heavy pan, fry dough in hot oil until bubbles appear on dough (takes only seconds). Turn and fry on other side briefly. Makes about 10

Add desired toppings such as beans, rice, salsa, cheese, tomato, etc.



Kay teaching us about how to cook beans in a crock pot. Helpful hint: soak beans about 2-3 days before you use them to get the gas out of the bean.
Enjoying our yummy tacos!

Thank you Ronnalynn! And thank you to those who came!

Christmas Celebration

We had a wonderful evening Thursday celebrating Christmas as ward sisters. We toured Marie Connell's home, Melissa Houston's, and Pat & Vern Romney's home where they shared their Christmas traditions. There were yummy treats along the way! Vern shared a special story with us about making Christmas a 'Christ Day'. Thanks to everyone who helped make this a special night! Merry Christmas!

Great Super Saturday!

We had a great Super Saturday and want to thank everyone who helped in anyway. We learned how to make some awesome popcorn treats, and cheap fun Christmas gift ideas. Lunch was delicious, and lots of fun projects!

Alternative Cooking Class a Great Success!

We had a wonderful evening learning new ways to cook food without electricity! A special thanks to Ronnalynn Dean, Vaughn & Kay Anderson, and Jerry & Aimee Shuldberg.

Here's a couple recipes for your Dutch Oven Cooking:

Dutch Oven Potatoes - by Vaughn & Kay Anderson
12 inch dutch oven
7-8 potatoes pealed and sliced, enough to fill your oven with in inch from the top
1 onion
1/2 pound bacon (can be pepper or smoke)
1 can diced chilies or a diced jalapeno
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
1 cup shredded cheese (enough to cover the top at the very end)
Black pepper, Creole seasoning and Cumin to taste
Salsa - optional
Instructions: Brown bacon - set aside. Leave a little oil to saute onions and peppers till soft. Add soup, seasonings and bacon together. It will be easier to mix everything before the potatoes are added. Then add potatoes - mix until coated with soup mixture. Cook until tender. (About 45 min - 1 hour.) Stir occasionally so the bottom won't burn. Sprinkle cheese on top. Serve when chesse is melted. Can also be served with salsa.


Dutch Oven Orange Rolls - by Jerry and Aimee Shuldberg
Ingredients:
2 tubes buttermilk refrigerator biscuits
1 square margarine
1 orange
2 cups powdered sugar
Directions:
Melt butter in homemade aluminum bowl placed on top of hot dutch oven lid. Dip both sides of biscuits in margarine, fold in half and pinch at top. Place biscuits side by side in pan. Bake in 10" dutch oven with 8-10 coals on bottom and 12-16 coals on top, for about 25 minutes. Cut zest from orange. Put in Ziploc bag with powdered sugar, then squeeze juice from orange into the Ziploc bag. Close bag and mix by squeezing bag until consistency of thin frosting. Pour icing over rolls. Return to oven 1-2 minutes.

Alternative Cooking Class

We will be having an Alternative Cooking Class on Thursday, September 23rd at 7:00 pm at the home of Ronnalynn Dean's. Come learn different ways to cook....dutch oven, solar oven, volcano, Rocket Stove, etc. Spouses are invited too! We hope to see you there!

Update on Rebecca Tomlinson

Rebecca has been growing well and is now just under 5lbs. !!!!! Yes, you read that right!!! Lol. She’s 2220 grams as of last night…I’m excited to see what she’s up to tonight. When we pick her up now, it finally feels like there’s actually a baby in the blanket. I used to feel like she was practically going to float up into the air when I’d pick her up.

The docs are trying out different feeding routines/supplements and so forth to try to get her more ready to come home. They’ve been letting her take as much as she wants out of the bottle, but she doesn’t take as much as she needs (she needs an unusually high volume of food for her size), so she’s still on the NG tube for part of her feeds.

For a while there I’d thought we were almost ready to head home, and then a problem came up with her feeds, and we were set back again. That was hard. But things are looking hopeful again.

Thank you to all for your help and for your prayers. We really appreciate hearing those who tell us that we are in their prayers. I truly believe that it has made a difference for Rebecca. I am so grateful that we can care for each other and petition the Lord for each other. It must please him that we care about each other so much. I know that Rick, Mike and I are grateful.

Love, Jane

We Want Your Recipes

We thought that it would be fun to put together a ward cookbook. We will be gathering recipes over the next few months. Please email or get a copy of your favorite recipes to Susan LaHargoue
(email: suesweets@msn.com) as soon as you can so she can start compiling them. We're really excited about this cookbook and feel it will be a fun thing for our ward.

Rebecca Tomlinson

Rebecca’s growth has leveled off a bit, and now the doctors are concerned that Rebecca still has an undiagnosed problem. They are consulting with experts such as “metabolic geneticists” to look at rare genetic problems among other things.

After being so excited that she was growing normally, we’re finding this news a little hard. But we’re hopeful that the news will get better (again) soon. In the meantime, we’re enjoying her very much. Besides being very small, she’s not too different from a regular full-term baby. The doctors say that she seems a little behind developmentally (apparently she should be looking at things more at her age), but overall, she’s doing very well.

With her broviac line out, she’s a lot easier to pick up etc, and we both spend a lot of time holding her and feeding her etc. Rick is the bottle expert (preemies need a different approach to bottle feeding than full-sized babies).

Michael is with his dad right now, which helps make things a little easier for us.

Thank you all for your love and prayers. We appreciate all that has been done for us very much.

Love, Jane

P.S. I forgot to mention that Rebecca hit 1500 grams a couple of days ago, which is 3 lb 5 oz. She had been hovering around 1300 for about 8 weeks, and then after she was given the antibiotics for her tummy and was also given a ton more calories/protein, she began growing better, and put on 100 grams in one week. The next week she put on about 55 grams, but that was also the week that she had her broviac taken out, and that actually has a bit of weight to it, so she put on more than it seemed. But then this week she’s leveled out a bit again, and hasn’t grown much. Rebecca is definitely a “woman of mystery,” but with everything she’s been through, she amazes everyone with her resilience.

Wheat Cooking Class

We had a great wheat cooking class last week! The samples were awesome, and who knew you could do so much with wheat! You can check with Ronnalynn to get the recipes.

A special thanks to Ronnalynn Dean, Kay Andersen, and Marilyn Lindsay.

Update on Rebecca Tomlinson

Rebecca has recovered well from her eye surgery, and was off the ventilator in just one day, much to our relief. Her follow-up eye exam was yesterday, and apparently her eyes look the way they’re supposed to. She’ll have another follow-up in a week or two, and hopefully she’ll be doing just great.

The really great news is that it looks it may have finally been figured out why she hasn’t been growing properly and what to do about it. A pediatric gastroenterologist from Primary Children’s was consulted and he said that he had seen a few children over the years who had an overgrowth of the good bacteria in their intestines. The bacteria can form such a mass that the body can’t cope with the food coming through, and the body just dumps the food without absorbing it. Rebecca’s stools haven’t looked normal, but the doctors had thought that it was just from her jaundice problem.

So a few days ago, Rebecca was started on a different kind of antibiotic, and we waited and watched to see if her stools would change. And they did! And she’s been putting on weight! It’s a bit too soon to tell, but we’re hoping that she’s on the road to growing normally. And for the past two days, for the first time in her young life, she has actually weighed more than three pounds! She had been pretty fussy the previous couple of weeks, and we’re wondering if she just didn’t feel good from not having the nutrition she needed.

She was 40 weeks on Thursday, and three months old on Friday. This has been a good way to celebrate her due date! She also has seemed a lot more content the past few days.

Anyway…thanks to everyone for their love and help and prayers. It has truly made a difference for us.

Love, Jane Tomlinson

Update on Rebecca Tomlinson

It's been a while since I've been able to write an update. Rebecca has been off oxygen for some time now, and is doing well on "room air." She also got moved to a different part of the NICU, and into her own private room! Up until now, she had been in nursery A, which is for the babies who are not in a fully stable condition, but once she was off oxygen she was moved over to nursery B, which is for the babies who just need to get bigger. Rebecca has more issues going on than most babies in nursery B, but because she's still going to be there for a while, and she's basically stable, she got moved into one of the private rooms when it opened up. It's a really nice room with big windows, and it's quieter, so we were really grateful for the move. Her two big issues right now are her feeding/growing and her eyes. She actually just had her weekly eye exam, and it has been decided that she needs to have laser surgery tomorrow. She developed a condition called "Retinopathy of Prematurity" and she also has something called "Plus disease." Premature babies don't have their blood vessels grown all the way towards the front of their eyes, and some of the very small/early babies run into problems as those blood vessels try to grow forward after they are born. A ridge can develop and the blood vessels are not able to grow forward anymore. That's the ROP. If it's not treated, the retina can detatch, leading to blindness, but that is very rare where this laser surgery is available. The Plus disease is where the arteries in the eye begin to grow short-cuts across to the veins, instead of developing a nice capillary bed like they're supposed to. Anyway, she's having her surgery tomorrow (Thurs15^th), and we pray that it goes well for her. She has to be put back onto the ventilator tomorrow until she's recovered from the surgery, and she'll be back in nursery A for a while.

Rebecca's other big issue is her feeding. The doctors were concerned that she had a "stricture," or narrowing, of her intestines, and the last month has been spent doing various things to try to rule that out. But they were not able to confirm that she had one. So now the most likely explanation for some of the problems she's had with her tummy getting distended and with spitting up is that she is very sensitive. For example, whenever she's given a bigger dose of her multivitamins, she isn't able to keep it down.

It has been rather stressful, because one of the things that they've tried is giving her full-volume feedings of mom's milk, but diluted with water. The reason it was stressful to us is because she still hasn't grown much and I hated to see her on reduced calories. I told the doctors that she’s got a “stick figure”!

Finally she was put back on full-strength mom's milk a few days ago. But she still wasn't gaining weight. Preemies need extra calories to be able to grow properly--I'm not exactly sure why--and there's various different fortifications that can be added to mom's milk for that. Two different ones have been tried on her in the past, but her belly got distended after each one, which is part of the reason that there was concern about her having a stricture. I had wondered all along if her problem was more intolerance to the actual fortifiers rather than having a stricture, but because the stricture would have been a much more serious problem, the possibility of that had to be eliminated first.

I had heard that there were other fortifiers that were more gentle and easy for the babies to tolerate, and last Saturday, I began asking the staff about what those were. There was a lot of discussion back and forth, and I found out that there is one called Prolacta which is basically dried human milk. When I heard about it I said, "I want that one!" Apparently it's expensive and so is not used that often, but it's very easy for the babies to digest, and with Rebecca's history, the doctors and dietitian all agreed that it would be best for her. She's been on it for 1 1/2 days, and seems to be doing well so far. She'll be on it a while more before any more changes are tried, but if she does well, they'll add some other stuff too, which will give her some extra, badly-needed protein.

Apart from her medical issues, she's doing well in many ways. Her head has been growing at a normal rate, and even though her arms and legs are smaller than they should be, she's surprisingly strong. She sometimes scooches right up out of her swaddling, and the nurses find her in funny places inside her isolette.

Most babies of her age are in regular, open cribs, but because Rebecca is so small, she is not yet able to maintain her own body temperature and has to stay in the isolette.

She has been having "nursing lessons," and is doing well. Annie, the lead occupational therapist, says that Rebecca is the smallest baby she has ever helped learn to nurse in the 30 years she's been working with babies! Rebecca's mouth is so small, I had my doubts about how well things would go, but there are lots of people here who know how to help, and things are good.

Rebecca seems to be able to learn quickly (so far), for example she has picked up nursing fast, and everyone seems to think that she "responds appropriately" to examinations, interactions etc etc.

Although we're concerned about Rebecca having to go through the discomfort of the eye surgery tomorrow, we are grateful to know that the doctor who will be doing it has a really good record of success, and that it usually goes very well.

And after she's recovered from the surgery, her broviac line can come out next time the visiting surgeon is around. And then she'll be able to wear clothing! That will be so fun! Rebecca has been the fortunate recipient of our ward's abundant supply of preemie girl hand-me-downs, and she has also been blessed by friends and family members who have amazingly good taste in baby clothing, and I just can't wait to dress Rebecca up in all her gorgeous outfits!

Rebecca has been sleeping off her eye-exam while I've been writing this, which is part of the reason I was able to get away to the parent lounge and use the computer. Babies who are fed through the nasogastric tubes are usually fed every three hours, and breastfeeding attempts are done at those times, but Rebecca is on continuous feeds (i.e. it's constantly, slowly dripping through) due to her tendency to spit up, so it's been decided that our nursing attempts will be when she's awake and alert. So usually when I'm here, I'm sitting in her room, watching to see when she'll wake up well. I don't like to leave it for the nurse to tell me when she's well awake, because by the time the nurse notices, Rebecca is usually very upset, and that's not the best way to have a good oral feeding lesson.

We are grateful to everyone for their kind interest and help towards our family. I'll try to get some new photos to share soon. I’d better go now.

Love,
Jane Tomlinson

Wheat Cooking Class

Tuesday, July 27th at 10:00 am at Kay Anderson's home. Mark your calendars and plan to join us! We will be learning the following:

Homemade wheat bread (already made and samples)
Wheat Pita Bread with a delicious topping
Blender Waffle/Pancakes
Wheat Berries made into - Breakfast Cereal, Alternative TV Snack,
and Cranberry Orange Salad.

You don't want to miss this fun and informative class! Hope to see you there!

Sisters Temple Day

Our Sisters Temple Day will be this Thursday, July 8th. We will meet in the chapel at about 9:10 am for the 9:30 am session. We will be eating lunch in the temple cafeteria after the session for anyone that would like to join us. Hope to see you there!