McAlister Matters

  Happy Easter Everyone! It was a nice Spring day here. Kahlan and I got to sing in the choir at church. We sang 4 numbers including " Were You There? ". We've been enjoying some good weather along with the occasional snow or rain storm. Paul had a birthday last week. It's hard to believe he's 7! We went to the West Bountiful Park and had pizza with his Utah cousins. Paul is such a good kid. He gets up every morning and practices his piano and rarely has to be reminded about anything. He loves Legos, Minecraft, now StarCraft and playing with Penny and the older kids. He's top of his class at reading and loves books about Star Wars and animals and facts. He's still the master puzzler. I recently started working full-time at my job. So far it's been good. We've been having fun using ChatGPT to turn some of our recent pictures into Studio Gibli drawings. The kids have gotten a kick out of it. We were really into watching Studio Gibli movies last year....

  We celebrated Penny's 5th birthday last week. The Utah cousins came over on Monday night for cake and ice cream. Penny was very excited to be 5 years old. Now she can stay up until 8pm and play the Nintendo Switch with the other kids. She got a new backpack for her birthday and a new Lego set. We took her out to Penny Anne's Cafe for her birthday lunch. She wanted sourdough pizza for her b-day dinner. On Saturday for Spring break we left on our epic journey to Nauvoo, IL. The weather was nice when we left. It took about 5 hours to get to Martin's Cove in Wyoming. It's a remote spot where there is now a cattle ranch that the church owns. We got to pull some handcarts and some nice senior missionaries showed us around. There was a visitors center there with artifacts and exhibits and a video about the Willey / Martin handcart rescue . We went on a hike to the Devil's Gate landmark pictured in the background. It was a pretty landscape.  Most of Wyoming along I-80 is ...

  It's been a cold winter since the start of 2025. We've just been staying warm inside. This year we've been studying the D&C and church history . To go along with that we planned a Spring break trip to Nauvoo, IL. We leave this Saturday. It will be a lot of driving but we'll see a bunch of sites along the way. Sarah finished writing her fantasy novel! It's a fun read and she's working on getting it published.  The kids have been awesome. They've been into Legos a lot. We have dozens of sets and they can spend hours working on their assemblies. They are also all great singers and artists. Recently they've been into the Matilda (Netflix) and Zombies (Disney) soundtracks. They also did a funny rendition of Moana together one day, kind of like a little play. They've also been having fun playing a video game called Vampire Survivors on the Switch.  Kahlan participated in her school play this year Alice in Wonderland. She was part of the ensemble and ...