Dad, Tell Me About the Time (49)

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Who decided on the name of each child?

Not long after we started dating, mom and I went to a movie called Xanadu. It starred Olivia Newton John as a muse named Kira. 

Kira’s second name, Anne, is from Lisa’s great grandma Shaw, Annie (Robertson) Shaw.

Brandons second name, James, is from Lisa’s great grandpa, James Shaw, Annies’s husband. Lisa knew and loved her great grandparents well.

Brandon is just a name that Lisa and I both loved. We would choose names by both suggesting a name and if one of us didn’t like the name then we moved on to a different name.

Lisa has always loved the name Benjamin and always wanted to name a son Benjamin. When she suggested his name, I loved it as well, so our second son was Benjamin. We thought about making his second name Shaw, but Lisa didn’t like the sound of Benjamin Shaw Leavitt so we went for “Scott” to honor her Scottish heritage.

As we have gotten older and our ancestors have become more important to us, we sometimes regret that we didn’t just use “Shaw” as his middle name.

Alycia is named after three different people. Alycia’s middle name is Grayce which was her Grandma Shaw’s middle name. Donna Grayce Kesler. We liked the spelling with the “y”, so we kept it.

Her first name, Alycia, is after her great grandma, Alice (Logan) Ashmead. Alycia is a variant of the name Alice. We added the “y” so it would match the “y’ in Grayce and we thought it was pretty.

Oddly, hundreds of years ago, Alice was actually spelled Alys. I think it has German roots.

Finally, my grandma Leavitt’s middle name was also Grace. Nellie Grace Quinton.

Alex is an odd one. Neither one of us had ever considered Alex as a name, but once Lisa started making progress with her genealogy, she started finding a lot of Alexanders in her ancestry. She suggested it to me, and I loved it. Somehow we both knew our third son had to be named Alex.

His middle name, Thomas, also comes from several ancestors.

Even though he goes by Boyd, Lisa’s dad’s full name is Thomas Boyd Shaw. 

Lisa’s grandpa Shaw’s name is also Thomas Boyd Shaw.

My second great grandfather was Thomas Rowell Leavitt.

Sarah is a huge name on the Leavitt side. My fourth great grandmother was Sarah Shannon Leavitt. Her daughter, my third great grandmother, was Sarah Sturdevant Leavitt and is the woman who first joined the church and along with her large family, migrated west with the saints. The hardest part of this trek she had to do as a single mother since her husband died near Winters Quarters. Sarah’s middle name, Christine is a name that mom and I both loved.

Dad, Tell Me About the Time (48)

 Friday, March 21, 2025

Are all of your children your biological offspring?

Lisa and I had no problems having children. We always planned ahead, picking what month we wanted a child and that was the month that we had a child. Lisa did miscarry once between Ben and Alycia but that was the only problem we ever had. We wanted our children spaced about two years apart and they were born as follows:

     Kira            1982
     Brandon     1984
     Ben            1986
     Alycia        1989
     Alex           1991
     Sarah         1993

While we had no problems conceiving and bearing children, several of our children did struggle. Kira couldn’t get pregnant and ended up adopting her first three children. They were then blessed to be able to give birth to a sweet little girl. Ben and Sharley had no problem conceiving but were unable to carry the child to full term. They finally figured out what was wrong and then with proper medication she gave birth to two more children. Sarah also couldn’t conceive until they figured out what was going on and with proper medication she gave birth to two beautiful children.

We have been very blessed through both adoption and the foster system. They both come with inherent problems and heart ache, but they are also great blessings. Kira and Justin’s oldest three are adopted and Ben and Sharly chose to foster two sisters at two different times. While they only fostered one at a time, for all practical purposes, they are now fostering the entire family of four girls.

Are any adopted?

See above

How did you react when you found out you would become a parent for the first time?

When we first got married, we wanted to have children as soon as possible. We were married July 11^th but come October, when I was back in school, Lisa decided that maybe she would go to school and get a university degree also. As far as we knew, she wasn’t pregnant yet, so she quit her job and started submitting university applications. In November she missed her period. While it was a bummer that she had quit her job (the maternity leave would have been helpful) we were ecstatic. We never regretted starting our family early and every one of our children was planned and wanted. 

Oranges

Monday, March 17, 2025

Less than a year ago we bought a Valencia Orange Tree for the other corner of our yard. We now have an Owari Satusma Mandarin Orange on the south side of the yard and a Valencia Orange on the north side. The Mandarin is easy to peel and great for eating while the Valencia makes great juice.

This is the second year for our Mandarin and it produced a ton of small mandarins. They were delcious and we started eating them around Christmas time. I have since learned that if I give them plenty of water they will grow much larger oranges.

Our Valencia is less than a year old but it still had several large delicous looking oranges on it. It is difficult to know when oranges are ripe because they turn orange early and the color is not a good indicator of ripeness. Everything we read said the Valencia should be ready in March.

This weekend we checked the oranges. They were ripe and maybe a little too rip so we picked all six oranges. It looked funny with these six huge oranges on a tiny little tree. We juiced them all and enjoyed some very delicous and very fresh orange juice.

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The color "orange" is named after the fruit and not the other way around. Before the orange was introduce from China in the 1,300's the color didn't have a name.

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Human Foosball

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Every month for mutal we have one week that is a combined activity. This month the Deacons were in charge of the combined activity. We decided to play “Human Foosball”. 

What a blast. We had the scoreboard up and had two announcers.

The kids had a lot of fun.

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A mature Giant Sequoia can use 500-800 gallons of water every day during the summer

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A Great Weekend With Half The Family

Monday, March 3, 2025

Late in January, Sarah & Sam and Family were going to be in Arizona. Well Sarah & Family didn’t make that trip and it got postponed until this last weekend. We couldn’t get any of the cheap tickets so we drove out. It was a quick trip but a ton of fun.

Mom left work early last Friday and we arrived not too late but the kids were all in bed so we visited with Kira and Justin for a little bit, said goodnight and went to bed ourselves.

Saturday we all did the Renaissance Festival and it was a ton of fun. While it was a ton of fun, it wasn’t all that conducive to visting with each other. Ben and Sarah and their families arrived just before 1:00 and we hugged and kissed and then separated based on the varying interests of the eleven grand kids and several of their friends.

Even when we were able to hook up, it was usually to watch a show and so it was hard to visit and everyone was worried about losing a kid.

In any case, the shows were (for the most part) great and the jousting was fun and the plan was to end up at Kira and Justins for a pool party. Unfortunately, Mom and Kira’s car ended up leaving at the worst time, and it took them over an hour just to get out of the parking lot and another hour to get home. The party didn’t happen, but we put all the kids to bed and Kira, Mom and I headed to Bens to get in a proper visit.

Sunday was Kira’s stake conference so mom and I met up with Ben and Sarah and their entourage for breakfast at “Joes Farm” and then we all left just after 10:00. Sarah and Sharly left for their tatoo appointments and the rest of us crashed at Bens house.

Around noon we all headed back to Kira’s for that pool party and lunch. Mom and I headed for home shortly after 3:00 and had a great drive home. The only mishap was when I did a canon ball into the pool with my hearing aids in. About an hour later I realized that I hadn’t taken them out. We found them on the bottom of the pool and quickly put them in a bag of rice. I need to check them this morning to see if they still work. I really hope they do.

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The population of London went up 500% between the 12th and 14th centuries

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Magrath Cardston Marching Band

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Happy Birthday Ben!!!

This morning, I was scrolling through some more of the pictures Lisa took when she was in Idaho, and I saw this picture of the band I was in when I was in ninth grade. This picture was taken the year I was in the band because I clearly remember playing in the half-time show during an Edmonton Eskimos football game. It was freezing. I thought my mouth was going to freeze to my mouthpiece. What the article doesn’t say is that we were also invited to play in the Rose Bowl parade, but we couldn’t afford to go.

We had the best drumline. All the other bands had a simple cadence, but our drumline played a beautiful and complicated rhythm, and they played it so loud that when we were practicing before a tournament, we would mess up other bands who were practicing in the same parking lot.

Our conductor was Boyd Hunter, and he was a very strict and traditional conductor. He would have been horrified by the modern marching bands with all the fluff and flags and gimmicks. We didn’t do anything simple. Our patterns and even simple turns were done with a flourishing and looked amazing. I really wish I could see one of our field shows.

I would have loved to play in the band during high school, but I had to choose between band or auto mechanics and drafting. It wasn’t much of a choice. Those 4:30 mornings were rough, but I did love marching.

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The earliest marching bands that historians have documented were from the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century.

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Family History

Monday, February 24, 2025

It seems like Family History has been a big part of my life for the last month. Lisa is now the Relief Society Activities Chairperson and she planned an activity called “We All Have Something from Grandma”. As she prepared for this activity there were all these picture of her grandmothers floating around the house.

Last week she was in Idaho helping Melissa and Kristan go through Jackie and Ross’s old papers and organizing items that might have some family history value. So all last week there were pictures popping up on the family chat. Here are some of the pictures that I have seen in the last two weeks.

Lisa with her Grandma Kesler (Ashmead).

Grandma Kesler (Ashmead) with Alvin Kesler behind her and their scotty dog under the table.

Grandma Kesler (Ashmead) and a friend.

Lisa’s Granny Neidig

Morgan Lybbert is my mom’s first cousin

If I made one of these for my boys, it would have six generations of Leavitt men.

I loved this picture of my family in 1968.

I realized right away that this is the same picture that we did of my family. It is one last picture of the family how it was just before the oldest child left home. Greg went on his mission and Kira headed off to college.

What a cute little boy.

My dad while on his mission in New Zealand.

This isn’t family history, but this is the weather Lisa had while in Idaho. I think she shoveled that long walk three times while she was there.

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Hitler is partly responsible for the tradition that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Gay men were imprisoned, and forced to wear a pink triangle to identify them as gay.

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