2 Valentine's Day Candy Houses in 2 Days

When I flew to Boise in November, I took 2 suitcases--one with clothes and the other was full of candy, cookies, and cereal. After we ate a delicious Thanksgiving dinner at Nickie's, I thought the grandkids would have fun watching me make a Candy/Cookie house, so Nickie and I made 2. One for her children and one for my dear friends, Dan and Diane Edwards. Two weeks later I flew down to Mesa, Arizona, taking 2 more suitcases and made another Candy/Cookie house for my 5 grandsons down there. I wanted to make 2 more at Christmas time for my 4 grandchildren who live in the Salt Lake area, but I was so busy with my Christmas project for my sister Charlene, that I didn't get the other 2 houses made. Therefore, I decided to make them for Valentine's Day. This being a little unorthodox, I decided to call them Hansel & Gretel houses, so I bought 2 Hansel and Gretel books, made Scandavian Heartbaskets and filled them with candy, thus receiving the Candy house for Valentine's Day would make sense.

Here's the cute book I bought

and the heartbaskets that I made for Karli and Sage.

They were both such good readers

they both could read the book to me.

Sage and Karli with the first house on February 13.

Avery and Nash with their Valentine House.

Nash with his heartbasket--

notice it is without the candy since he already ate it.

A Christmas Miracle: Charlene's CD Album

Last June of 2010, I started worrying about how my sister Charlene's music needed to be recorded and how her children and grandchildren had never heard most of her music and had no idea of how prolific a composer she has been. My goal was to record all of her compositions onto CDs and give them to all of her children for Christmas. It was a daunting but enjoyable task. By December, we had recorded over 360 tracks of music which included 174 song titles plus minus tracks. The finished album of 10 CDs took over 7 months to complete and took up over 9 gigs of memory on the recording studio computer!

Below is a photo of Charlene recording her music at Full Fidelity,

the recording studio of Steve Phillips. He is seated behind Charlene.

Steve is so good at what he does and is so easy to work with; we would have

never been done by Christmas if we had gone to any other recording studio.

We spent so much time together,

I feel like Steve is a member of our family.

As a child, I remember hearing her at the piano composing into the wee hours of the morning. She wrote her first 2 compositions when she was only 14 years old. I have always wanted the world to know her music. She could have written music that could have been performed on Broadway. She could have performed on Broadway. She certainly had the voice and acting ability, plus beauty. The top photo of the album cover shows her performing when she was Miss Carbon County.

Below is a picture of Charlene when she was a runner up

for Miss Utah National Guard.

In 1977 she won 1st Prize in the Churchwide Relief Society song writing contest with "A Women's Prayer." It was sung when they dedicated all of the Relief Society Monuments in Nauvoo June 28, 1978, as well as also being sung in the Tabernacle when they held the 1st Women's Conference in the Fall of 1978. To the left is the front cover of when the Church published "A Women's Prayer" and also a photo of the statue that inspired the song Charlene wrote.

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I am so proud of Charlene. She is one of the truly Celestial people that walks on this earth today.