Lila

Lila’s birthday isn’t for another couple of months, but I’ve been thinking about her over the past few days and decided to write about our little girl who almost wasn’t.

In early 2008, Jeanell had scheduled an oblation to help with some issues she had been dealing with. Since pregnancy would be dangerous following this procedure, I would also need to get a vasectomy. Since this would mean our family was complete with our four boys, Jeanell and I had discussed and decided we were ok with that.

But life had other plans. While attending a pre-op appointment for the oblation procedure, she mentioned to her doctor that she had “missed.” Testing was done and Jeanell’s suspicions were confirmed. She was pregnant.

(Jeanell believes she knows the night that this happened. I guess since I was still traveling most weeks at the time, it was easier to narrow down. We had gone over to Logan for some reason and while there stopped at Hastings. I bought her the complete box set of Friends on DVD. Apparently this spontaneous gift set the mood for fireworks later on).

Fast-forward to December of that year. Lila was due December 29. Jeanell had never naturally gone into labor (Devin was five days late and Jeanell was started when her blood pressure went up, with Tyler and Brayden she was started three weeks early, and with Caleb she was started two weeks early) so we thought that the same would happen with this pregnancy, that there would be no frantic trip to the hospital.

But the night of December 21, we were watching Mamma Mia together as a family and Jeanell started to experience contractions. It was snowing and the roads weren’t great, but we gathered some things and made the drive from Elwood to Logan, arriving shortly before midnight.

We got checked in and settled and about seven hours later, our little girl was born. I know I wasn’t a great husband that night because at some point I laid down in a bay window the room had and fell asleep. I was awake for the birth though. The doctor didn’t end up arriving until after Lila made her entrance.

We still had a couple of names in mind and hadn’t finalized when she was born, but we had known for some time that her middle name would be Rachel (after Jeanell’s sister, who had given birth to her first daughter, Emma Jeanell, a couple of months prior). Paige and Lila were the final two names we were considering (I had also suggested Mia earlier in the process). We said both of these names followed by Rachel and decided that Lila Rachel flowed better. So it was settled her name would be Lila. (Grandma Mouritsen gave Lila a book at her birth and inside the cover it says “Probably Paige”).

Since she was born, Lila has brought a happiness and enthusiasm into our life that is contagious. She fell in love with music early on and would sing songs from Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music at the top of her lungs while dancing in our Elwood kitchen. When she was young, we drove a fair amount around the state to attend her brothers’ athletic events and she loved to sing along with whatever music happened to be playing (“Something Stupid” by Michael Buble (she now prefers the Sinatra version)  and “Thank You for the Music” by ABBA are two that I remember).

I always loved her enthusiasm just for random things. One day when she was maybe three we were having lunch and when I set her up at the island she said she wanted to sit on the left.

“I love left!” she exclaimed.

“Why do you love left?” I asked.

“Because it’s my favorite way!”

One day we walked to church together and I wrote about that experience which again just showed her love of life and her curiosity.

I wasn’t always a model father (as has probably already been established). One day on my watch, I had her in her high chair and I was doing something on the computer with my back to her. She climbed out of the high chair and fell to the floor. But I picked her up almost right after she hit the floor.

Another time I took her with me to Logan and while there decided to purchase a TV. I don’t remember the exact details but I couldn’t fit the TV in our van with her seat buckled in where it normally would be so I put her in her seat but it was just kind of balancing next to me and I held onto it while I drove us back home to Elwood.

Since Jeanell and I both worked when Lila was young, she had a few different babysitters while we lived in Elwood, all of whom adored her. Her first babysitter was Judy Okada, who also had watched Caleb for us some. She eventually had to stop watching Lila to take care of her mom and I still remember how sad she was to not be able to watch Lila anymore.

We moved to Grantsville just before Lila turned five. This meant she got to attend Karma’s Kiddie Corner for preschool with her “dubbin” Emma. They also were in Aunt Meghan’s kindergarten class, Aunt Jean’s second grade class, and Kelly Painter’s third grade class together. (They were in different first grade classes. Lila had Joan Painter, who she loved and who has supported Lila in the years since).

While attending Willow Elementary, she had a special relationship with Lenna Lambert, who was the school’s librarian. After school, she would go and visit Lenna in the library until I could get there to pick her up. (We saw Lenna at the temple open house a week ago and Lila was able to give her a big hug. It had been a while since they had seen each other).

Before our new home in Grantsville was complete, I would go to my mom and dad’s house to work. Lila would ride the bus home to the house on Eastmoor and spend the rest of the day there.

While still in elementary school, she received a ukulele as a gift and fell in love with it. She taught herself to play and the chords. She would perform at various opportunities and eventually even wrote her own songs.

She started piano at a young age, first taking lessons from her Aunt Shannon, and then taking from Jenean Christensen, who she has taken from for several years now. I love being down in my office which is just below the piano room and hearing her play one of Billy Joel’s songs or something from a play we’ve seen recently.

We’ve always said that Lila is an “old soul” because she has a love and appreciation for things well before her time (her Grandma Jefferies says that if Lila had been her age, they would have been the best of friends). Her favorite artist is Billy Joel (I am also a fan and hope I played some small part in her fandom, but while I am mostly a “greatest hits” kind of fan, Lila knows the deep cuts). She also has an appreciation for The Beatles, The Four Seasons, Frank Sinatra, Carol King, and Queen.

One of the things Lila and I liked to do together was to go on drives, taking turns choosing songs to play and sing along to.

In addition to music, Lila has also developed an appreciation for The Simpsons from me (this has at times led to her getting in trouble as she did one day when we took her out of school early and as she left the class, called out “So long, suckers!” (a line from The Simpsons that I frequently quote). Her teacher found it less funny than I did).

We’ve also watched several of my “nostalgia” movies together. Dumb and Dumber, Liar, Liar, The Truman Show, Mrs. Doubtfire, Back to the Future, Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure, Wayne’s World, and others.

Lila has always been insanely talented musically. In addition to the piano and ukelele, she learned to play the bass to audition for a play (she sadly didn’t get the part). When she got into the high school, the orchestra conductor (Mr. Kim) needed clarinet players so she learned the clarinet. Later, he needed an oboe player so she started learning that. (At the last parent-teacher conference I had with Mr. Kim, he said that she still had a ways to go, but that her progress was amazing for the few short months she’d been learning).

Lila shares her parents’ love of musical theatre. Years ago, we took her to a performance of Little Shop of Horrors that was playing in downtown Salt Lake City that River Robinson (a talented actress from Grantsville) was performing in. Lila has been hooked ever since.

She’s been to New York four times with Jeanell and I and seen many plays there, but one of my favorite things is that she loves to go and see community theatre performances around the state. I’m sure I’ll forget some, but together we’ve seen Little Women and The Drowsy Chaperone at the Murray Amphitheater, Guys and Dolls and Into the Woods by Lehi Arts, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee by Sandy Arts, Evita at the Empress Theater in Magna, and Legally Blond at the West Valley Performing Arts Center. She loves to support local theatre and always gives a standing ovation.

Lila also loves to perform and has from a young age. She and Emma played the twin girls in The King and I at The Old Church. Lila has been in various other productions there as well.

When she reached junior high age, Lila decided to go to Excelsior Academy where she had the opportunity to be taught by the amazing Matt Price (Jeanell and I went to school with Matt and he has become a dear friend and mentor to Lila. Jeanell said to me on one occasion, “when we were going to school with Matt, did you ever imagine he’d become besties with our daughter?” I must say that no, I did not imagine that scenario). In addition to a revue her sixth grade year, she did four shows under Matt’s direction, Curtains (Chris Belling), Rock of Ages (Lonnie), Matilda (Miss Trunchbull), and Freaky Friday (the mom). She was also able to help music direct on some of those shows. She learned so much and put so much effort and energy into those shows.

In the last couple of years, she provided accompaniment for The Secret Garden at The Old Church and for Diary of a Wimpy Kid at Excelsior (Diary of a Wimpy Kid was brand new and there were not yet tracks available for it so Lila helped out by learning the score and accompanying the shows). She was also the Assistant Music Director for this past summer's Tooele Valley Theatre production of Into the Woods.

As she went into high school, she auditioned for and was accepted to the Centerpoint Academy at the Centerpoint Theatre in Centerville. She has had a wonderful time learning and developing her talents there over the past couple of years. They did a wonderful production of Big Fish last spring that I saw four or five times and loved each time.

Lila is such a bright spot in my life and I’m so grateful she is a part of it. She and I are kindred spirits and I love being able to enjoy so many wonderful things in life with her. I love you Lila.

My little girl and I

Shaving our heads in solidarity with Grandpa Mouritsen

New York, New York

You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown at Centerpoint

The Mission (Parte Dos)

I hadn’t planned to write an additional post about my mission, but while last week’s focused on my journal entries, I was reminded of some other occurrences from my mission that I didn’t necessarily write down at the time, but wanted to write now. These are events that transpired almost 30 years ago, so it’s possible that my narrative is not 100% accurate, but it is how I remember it. These are just random additional events or situations that I recall, in roughly chronological order.

One evening at the MTC some missionaries were arm wrestling and there was a missionary from Armenia who was beating everyone. A couple of Elders came and got me to arm-wrestle him. When I got there, he had just finished a match with his right arm so we wrestled with our left arms and I won. But then we wrestled again with our right arms and he beat me.

Push-ups in the MTC

(Later in my mission when I was in Tlalnepantla, the 2nd time, Elder Nelson, who as I recollect is Merrill and Karen Nelson’s nephew, was serving with my previous companion, Elder Galvez. We arm-wrestled one night and he beat me with both arms, to my surprise and chagrin).

When I first arrived in the field, we all went to a chapel somewhere (all the missionaries who were going to a new area or getting a new companion). I left with my first companion (Elder Inda) and we took a taxi to my first area. I think we were traveling with our Zone Leader (Elder Nielsen), who maybe had also gotten a new companion. I don’t remember for sure. But our first stop was at Elder Nielsen’s apartment. We got there and he pulled out a guitar he’d purchased in the mission field and started playing “Hotel California.” I remember thinking, “what is happening?”

Eventually, we left and went to my first living quarters. It was a house and we lived there with another companionship (two American missionaries when I arrived there, Elder Davidson and Elder Jackson). When I first arrived there, the boiler in the house didn’t work and we also didn’t have a pump to get water up to the 2nd story of the house where the shower was. So we’d fill a 5-gallon bucket with water, plug in an old, broken iron that we had, and drop the iron into the bucket. Then we’d wait for the water to get hot, carry it up to the shower, and wash ourselves with the warm water. I remember telling JaNae about this when she and Sunnie came to visit, and she was quite sure I was pulling her leg. But it was the truth. Eventually a member in our area fixed both our boiler and our pump and we were able to take more normal showers.

The infamous boiler

The pump could still be finicky though. I remember Elder Fletcher came and stayed at our place one night (probably after we had gone to watch the BYU-Utah game at Benemerito with Sunnie and JaNae) and when he went to take a shower there wasn’t any water. I remember him standing in the bathroom in a towel while I ran downstairs and tried to get the pump working. I think eventually I did.

Speaking of Elder Fletcher, not long after I arrived in the field, he baptized a man who wanted to be baptized in a river, like Jesus. Not many members were going to be there so several of the missionaries went. I recall having to get up very early and it being a 2-3 hour combi (a Volkswagen van) ride. My comment on it which I did record in my journal was “I guess it was pretty cool, but it definitely was not worth the trip.” (I'm sure Elder Fletcher felt otherwise).

Elder Fletcher, Elder Diaz, and I

One night when I was with Elder Hope, he was bitten by a dog. There were wild dogs all over in Mexico but somehow we determined that this dog belonged to someone and knocked at their gate. A woman came out and I informed her that her dog had bitten my companion. She didn’t seem overly concerned but produced a paper that supposedly showed that the dog had had its shots. Elder Hope thought it was a list of people the dog had bitten.

Elder Hope and I (and my crooked tie)

In that area we ate our meals with the Perez family. They were a relatively wealthy family and had a business where they manufactured drill bits or something (at least that’s what I remember, I was never entirely sure). They lived in a tiny apartment above their shop where the manufacturing occurred. She made excellent meals and always a lot of food. When Elder Gakvez became my companion that area, before we ate our first meal together, he told me he was a pretty big eater. After we ate our first meal together, he learned what a big eater really was and never made that claim again. On one occasion, Hna Perez told me as she served the first plate that there wasn’t anymore on this occasion, and then turning to Elder Galvez, said “No lo lleno.” (I can’t fill him up).

The Perez Family with Elder Lozano and I

In this same area, Elder Hope and I had started teaching a larger woman by the name of Imelda. When Elder Galvez took Elder Hope’s place and he had visited her a few times, he told me that he thought Imelda was more interested in me than in the Church. I dismissed what he said until one day we showed up to teach a discussion and she had hired a photographer to come and take our picture. I’m not sure why, but I allowed the picture to happen. But then we left and stopped visiting. Some time later, she called our apartment and when I answered she said “No te puedo olvidar.” (I can’t forget you). She even showed up at the chapel at one point and told the Ward Mission Leader that she had been planning to be baptized but that Elder Galvez had turned me against her or something like that. She had a nephew who was probably 8 or 9 who was always there when we visited. A friend of ours from the area (Carlos Gomez(?)) would tease me that the nephew would call me “Tio (Uncle) Mouritsten.”

Elder Galvez and I

I was in Linda Vista in 1997 when the Jazz were playing the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Finals. On the evening of Game 6, four of us missionaries who lived together were back at the little cafe where we had our meals at the time and the game was on. I was trying hard not to watch but the other missionaries had already decided to watch. With about five minutes left, I suddenly said “what am I doing?” and went and sat down and watched. I saw the comeback and Stockton’s final shot to send the Jazz to the Finals. I ended up seeing at least part of most of the games in the Finals as well. We were teaching a man whose family had recently been baptized and we’d go and teach him a discussion (probably as quickly as we could), say the closing prayer, and immediately turn on the game. I remember watching the Game 6 loss and being disappointed and the man who we were teaching me telling me that they had played very well. My companion at the time (Elder Hurtado) was a Bulls fan so that didn’t help.

Elder Hurtado, me, and the man (Hno Blanquel) we taught during the 1997 NBA Finals

He got baptized, we got to watch the Finals. It was a win, win.

The following Christmas Eve I was in Arbolillo with Elder Zepeda. We went over to a member family’s house and spent the evening with them. They had a computer and we played games on it that night. I guess I kind of hogged the computer. When we returned to our apartment, I could tell Elder Zepeda was bugged. When I asked what was wrong, he said that he didn’t think the computer-playing time had been very equal.

Another night it was dark and a drunk guy started chasing us with a knife. He was pretty drunk and I don’t remember feeling too scared because he couldn’t move very well, but Elder Zepeda sprinted past him and told him to “vayase a la goma” (go to hell?).

In Arbolillo we lived with the Espinoza family, probably my favorite family from the mission. They had four younger daughters: Alicia (12 at the time), Betzabe (10), Barbara (8) and Andrea (5?). Hno and Hna Espinoza were supposedly very strict but they loved the missionaries a lot. I cried the day I was moved from that area.

The Espinoza Family (they get two pictures since they were my faves)

When I was in Arbolillo, I met Elder Zimmerman and Elder Maravilla who each had a hilarious sense of humor. Elder Zimmerman was a convert and on one occasion told us how in an Institute class he had taken after joining the Church, they’d told him how some of the early Brethren would stand on a chair to put their garments on so the garment wouldn’t touch the floor. That turned into an improv of Brother Brigham walking in on Brother Joseph while Joseph was standing on a chair putting his garments on. Probably a bit irreverent, but definitely funny.

Elder Maravilla supposedly had the entire script of Dumb and Dumber memorized and would often throw those quotes out. I remember on one occasion a missionary telling another missionary he couldn’t do something and Elder Maravilla immediately chiming in, “You can’t triple-stamp a double-stamp!”

But the funniest was that Elder Maravilla would then cite a specific talk from General Conference and say this General Aurhority had called him to repentance when he said something like, “If you’re filling your head with movie quotes and song lyrics instead of the scriptures, you need to repent.”

My last area (Xalpa) was the only time in my mission I was on a bicycle (the rest of the time I walked, like pioneer children). When I arrived in the area, my companion (Elder Morales) and his previous companion had been riding out to these tiny towns and mapping out the streets. We lived in Xalpa and the chapel was in Xalpa so I suggested we instead focus our work in Xalpa. “We’re missionaries, not cartographers,” I told him (pretty clever, huh?). He responded that all the doors in Xalpa had already been knocked. I challenged that and we started knocking the doors in town, usually doors close to members in the ward. I don’t remember ever knocking on a door where they knew who we were.

My bike

If you’re still reading this, thank you. This can’t be that interesting to anyone but me, but I wanted to get a record of some more of my memories from the mission.