Happy Birthday Dad!

Today my dad would have been 64 years old.  Ok that is so weird!  He has been gone now for 19 years!  That is even more weird.  I have been thinking a lot about him today. I wanted to do something for FHE to teach my kids some things about him.  I want them to know about him so that when they see him again they will know him just as I know that he knows them!  So I gathered some things from around the house that represented things about him and his life.  Then I put them in a bucket and let the boys each pick out an item one by one and then I told them what the item represented.  I showed them about 8 things and told them the stories behind them.  They really were quite well behaved for FHE because they love hearing stories about our family.  So I wanted to write down some things that I remembered about my dad so that not only I could remember but that my kids could too.  I wrote down 17 things about him in 2011 on that anniversary of his death.  I don't know if I can come up with 64 things but maybe with the 17 I already have I can get a few.

1.  He was a photographer and developed his own photos in a darkroom that we had in our house in Lindon.
2.  He planted a garden every year.  We got to weed it-not my favorite.  He would roto-till and then we would all plant the seeds.  We didn't have a sprinkler system so he watered it by hand and I think we irrigated too.
3.  He gave my mom jewelry probably every Christmas.  She had a ring of almost every stone like sapphire, ruby, emerald, opal and others.  I got to wear the sapphire ring to prom because that was the color of my dress.
4.  He had a piggy bank in his closet that he kept his saving/Christmas money in.
5.  He took us to Disneyland and Knot's Berry Farm.
6.  He liked having new cars.  We spent many an afternoon in car dealerships.
7.  He loved diet coke and would stack the 6 pack bottles like bricks in our garage waiting for the day that they would turn them in for recycling.
8. He had a green house out back that he built.
9. He would let us comb his hair and put barretts in it while he sat in front of us while watching TV.
10.  He built a sauna in the basement and solarium off the back porch in the Lindon house.
11.  He wore sports jackets with those sued patches on the elbows.
12.  When we would go on trips he would hook up a small TV to a VCR in the back of the big van so that we could watch movies.
13.  He would take us camping at Payson Lakes.  We would play in the lake in those yellow float tubes.
14.  We had a tent trailer at one time and then we upgraded to a regular RV.  It had bunk beds in the back.
15.  He would travel sometimes for work.  I know that he and my mom went to San Antonio and he went to Winnipeg.  They also went to Hawaii, The Virgin Islands and somewhere in Mexico.
16.  He was very generous.  Laurel and I both got these particle board kitchen sets for Christmas one year.  We each got one because we were spoiled like that.  A few years later he took one of them and fixed it up to give to his brother's kids for Christmas.
17.  He gave Grandma Gessel amethyst earrings one year for Christmas.
18.  We would go up to Logan every year on the day after Christmas to see his family.  We never stayed the night there though.
19.  He took a picture of me and Laurel out in a field of flowers in dresses that my mom had made us.
20.  The weekend before he died he gave me $200 because I had wrecked my car the week before.  I hung on to those 2 hundred dollar bills for a long time.
21.  He let me teach his Sunday school or Primary class once or twice when I was 16.  I couldn't have been much older than the kids I was "teaching".
22.  We had one of those hugely ginormous satellite dishes in our house in Lindon.  We probably could have contacted NASA with that.
23.  My dad was really smart with math and science stuff and could help me with my homework.
24.  He loved for us to play the piano and made us get up in the dark morning hours so that we would practice before school.  He made Laurel and me both get up at the same time and go into the cold, closed off piano room .  Whoever wasn't practicing got to lay by the heater and sleep.  We had to do it for a whole half hour!
25.  We had a dog named Fred that we got for Christmas.  He peed on my mom's blue carpet in the fancy living room.  I hated that dog.  He bit me and he was mean.
26.  My dad installed this tall streetlight light in the backyard.  It lit up the whole yard and made it really hard to sneak off and go toilet papering.
27.  He woudl eat this huge bowl of frozen yogurt at night before bed/
28.  He would eat that puffed corn square cereal that I can't remember the name of and pour honey all over it.
29.  We had lots of grapes/grape juice in our fruit room and he would make us Shirley Temples out of it.
30.  He always always always had a mustache.
31.  He had a collection of beer steins from Budweiser or something that he had been given over the years while working for 7-11.
32.  One year he got me a job at 7-11 up the road from our house in Orem, on 8th south and my job was to blow up helium balloons for about 4 hours every Saturday during football season.  7-11 was a sponsor of something for the BYU football games.
33.  He would give out slurpee coupons for things at church and at my mom's school for prizes.
34.  We ate a lot of slurpees and a treat was to go to 7-11.
35.  He took our family to the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City every summer for as long as I could remember.
36.  He pulled me and Chris out of the swimming pool after he jumped into the deep end right when we got to the hotel.  I jumped in after Chris to save him and then my dad saved both of us.
37.  He saved Suzanna's life when she choked on a quarter.
38.  He saved Laurel's life when she stuck her fingers into the mixer as she was making cookies-ok so I don't think she would have died but he did help her.
39.  He seriously wanted us to put water in the mac and cheese when we made it because the milk in it made Chris cough.  I did not like water in the mac and cheese.
40.  In the winter he would run on the treadmill in the big house in ORem.
41.  We had a piece of property that they were going to build a house on in Orem close to where they actually did buy a house later.  The property was in an asparagus patch.  I think we would pick it and take it home and eat it.
42.  My mom says that he didn't like spaghetti and that's why we didn't eat it very often.
43.He took us to church every Sunday and took us to Stake Conference in the old building in AF that had no AC and hard hard benches.
44.  He went swimming with us but he didn't like to get his hair wet.
45.  We would go on family bike rides around the "big block" and the "little block" in Lindon.
46.  He taught me how to ride my bike and roller skate.
47. He wanted us all to get married in the temple, go to college and go on missions and he would ask us 5 questions every night as he was tucking us into bed.  Theses are the questions and the answers that we gave back to him.  1.  Who loves you? (mom and dad)  2. Where are you going to get married? (the temple)  3.  Are you going to college?  (yes)  4. Are you going on a mission? (yes)    5.  Can you always come home?  (yes)
48.  He came and got me once from a party that I was really uncomfortable at because of the games that they were playing.
49.  He rescued me off the Veenker's playhouse when I climbed up there and then was too scared to get down by myself.
50.  He had a testimony.  His favorite Primary song was "Shine On" and when we would have FHE and sing songs around the piano he would always choose that one.
Wow!  I can't believe that I remembered that many things.  With those 50 and the other 17 from before, I
did get over 64 for his birthday!  Happy Birthday dad!  I miss you and love you and know that I will see you again.

****Edit  I remembered a few more things and so I am going to add to this list whenever I remember something else so that I don't fotget.
1.  He would take us out on "dates".  I can't remember if it was once a month or what but mom and dad took turns each taking one of us to do something with them.  Dad would always let me choose-I think-and I always wanted to go to the mall and go to the Cloud Nine store and the little store in the middle outside Cloud Nine that had something to do with Hello Kitty.  They were both knick knacky kinds of places with novelty type items.  I'm pretty sure that was not his favorite thing to do but he did it because I wanted to.
2.  He helped me make a model of the solar system for one of my classes.  I think we did it out of styrofoam balls but maybe it was a cake-I can't remember for sure.
3. He went to a daddy/daughter date with me for Merry Miss.  It was a sports theme and he wore a coke baseball jersey and a ball cap.  I wore a yellow oversized sweatshirt because I was a "cheerleader".  They took pictures of each of the dads and daughters.  He had a big wad of gum in his mouth and blew a bubble right when they took the picture.  I have that picture somewhere.
4.  Mom decorated a table for a church party and decorated it for dad's 40th birthday.  He was embarrassed and was s terd about it.