Favorite Callings, Piano lessons and a Move

     "My favorite calling was Primary Music Chorister and I was able to do that in that ward and it was so fun! So fun I absolutely loved it. What a great experience that was! I also directed the choir a couple of different times. Also when Amy was born we had decided that we would get a piano and I would start teaching piano students. 

     "I did that, I taught piano students in the afternoons – a lot of different people in the ward – Rachel and Rebecca Politis, I taught all of the Peterson kids, Marie Loretts, Abram, who else did I teach? The Rohas girls, Shaunna Geridel, just a lot of kids over the years. I would teach piano lessons, they would come to my home and I would teach them. I enjoyed it! I felt I was doing a fine job of it. 

     "When I was called as Relief Society president, I knew I needed to cut back on piano students. At this point I think I had 16 piano students and it made it kind of busy. I cut back on that, so a couple of families I said, “I’m so sorry about that, I’m going to have to have you go to someone else.” 

     "But I enjoyed that, I would put my money into the “piano account” and we’d use that for fundings on vacation or I would save that up and that was very useful when we bought our home over here in the Clayton Valley First Ward to help here on Wilson Lane, that’s the money that we used to buy furniture. I would save that money in my “piano account” and when we needed to buy the living room furniture – because for about the first year we only had a couch in the family room and didn’t have any furniture in the living room except for the piano, and the kids considered that the rough and tumble room until it was time to buy furniture. 

     "I loved being in Concord Third Ward. It was a smaller ward, lots of ins and outs with people, moving in and out because of the military, we had some military housing and navy housing there. There’s lots of turn-over there in the ward. Bishop Rossberg had been the bishop there for 9 years, what a great leader, what a great, great man. We loved our time there. 

     "It was when Amy was in second grade and Kristy was in kindergarten, and we started out in our little house there with zero children and now we had grown to three. Starting in January of that second grade year for Amy I started to home school her. There were a couple of kids in her class that were extremely dis-respectful to me and I kind of did the knee-jerk reaction of OH MY Goodness my child is going to be ruined! So I pulled her out and I was home schooling her for a while. 

     "And it was at that point that I realized that if I was going to home school that we needed a little more room. Our home of 1133 square feet was just not cutting it with three little kids under foot all the time. So it was in the end of January that we started looking. I had gone to an open house and seen a bigger house and the realtor looked at our house and said, “you know if you do a few little things here and there this would be a nice little house to sell”.  

      "She was our real estate agent and so we started looking and we sold our house and started looking and we found a house at 4249 Wilson Lane that we really liked. It was about 1900 square feet so about 750 feet more than what we had before. We were familiar with the area a little bit Amy had been swimming on – had been swimming at Bishop Estates for one year which was in the ward boundaries over here. 

     "We had heard really good things about Mountain View Elementary School.  I decided that after six months of home schooling Amy or five months that we’d finish off that year and then the next fall I would put her in school. If it work out fine and if not I wouldn’t worry about it.

      "So anyways it was real challenging for the several months that we were trying to get the house sold with three little kids, home schooling and trying to keep the house clean all of the time. It was insane, it was just insane.  We were really sorry to say goodbye to that little ward.  We had some really close friends there. We started this group with what we called the “Book Club”. And there was Ann Cope, Diedra Rader and Debbie Baird and myself, and Alison Lambson , and Jackie Harrison, and Brenda Lopez. It was fun we would get together at lunch and rotate peoples houses and read the books and it got to the point where we were all continuing to have children and we weren’t having time to get the book read and we’d get together and we finally just called it the “Lunch Bunch”.  

     "We’d take each other out to dinner out to lunch for our birthdays but it finally evolved into whenever we can get together, so even now today I’ll try to get everyone all together for the “Lunch Bunch”.  Debbie and Ann are in Benicia, Jackie moved, Alison and I are in this ward and Diedra is down in Northgate 2^ndward and we try to get together and what a blessing it is these ladies have been to me through all these years we’ve been through a lot of ups and downs. 

     "A lot of kids later – Ann has six, Debbie has six, Diedra has six, I only have four and Alison has three, but we’ve been good friends through all these years. We’ve had lots of ups and downs of kids choosing to do things differently than we would have them do and challenges of unemployment and challenges of “Oh I’m pregnant!” And challenges of my cancer and lots of things these ladies have been my friends for all these years, and I can call them at a moments notice and anytime I need someone to talk to and they are there! 

     "So we were able to sell our house, buy this house here. In May of 1998, 15 years ago we moved to the Clayton Valley First Ward.