"#Smile Bigger" and some "#Sweet Torture"

A post appeared in my Facebook feed tonight and I wanted to save it here... the original post was from July 22, 2014 when our whole family {minus Connor, who was on a mission in Taiwan} was on a trip in Moab.  On our first outing we wanted to find mud and the scheduled path would be approximately 4 hours of driving. WELL..... We ended up probably where NO street legal vehicle should have been and we were beginnig to run out of our bottled water as the 4 hour trip neared the 8 hour mark... we were kind of lost.  We had gone about 8 hours ONE WAY and then tried to figure out if we should "go back"... we kept going forward because we thought we knew the way out of this hellish little canyon that held all kinds of rock formations that we took our 4Runners and Jeep over. ~~~~~~~ Entry dated 22 July, 2014: In Elaine S. Dalton's October 2008 General Conference address she said:  "I had a small plate inscribed with a motto that read, "I can do hard things...

Sometime in April 2014 President Day asked us to send a letter of introduction about Connor to him and his wife in Taiwan.  I sent it via email. As I sat down to write it, many things crossed my mind and even when it was finished and I was quite satisfied that this would let them know all they needed to know about Connor when he arrived.  I then questioned the length of the letter, but after reading it several times, I felt I couldn't shorten it without depriving them of information they needed to know about this precious baby we were sending them.  So I felt satisfied, and emailed it off. Here it is:                                                                   ...

"Smile Bigger" and some "Sweet Torture" is coming soon.  What this will cover is what I can remember of our life with Connor Benjamin Thredgold, and our lives since he left to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Taiwan Taipei Mission. "Smile Bigger" has always been what I told the boys when I dropped them off at school or when they left for scout camp or whenever they left home.  Its what Connor would say to those he served with... which we did not know until the night before his funeral when Elder Perkins of the Seventy came with his wife to our home to visit with our family.  Many in Taiwan wrote Elder Perkins to say that this was a saying Connor frequently used... this of course made us gasp when Elder Perkins told us, as we had no idea he was using this quote we had used for many years in our family. The "Sweet Torture" portion is a term I began using to describe the feelings we have as we have at...