Dec 16 07

December 16, 2007

We had a high council speaker from Show Low. He brought his 4 children (the oldest is 7) and his wife (expecting another baby next month). The kids were very cute, but made Primary difficult because I had 10 kids from 2 years to 12 years old. It’s hard to keep something interesting going for that many different age levels. These kids sang Silent Night in Sacrament Meeting. And their father gave a very good talk. It was a good meeting.

After the meeting I ran over to the trailer to get a box of candy and by the time I got back Bro Wilcock and Elder Armajo were all set up and had kids helping put together more bags of nuts and candy. The Elders want to give them out at the Commercial Center tomorrow. They were almost done before I got back. How nice!

Then we visited with Maxine and David. We were worried about Maxine because she didn’t come to church. She’s OK. David got home from Las Vegas just before we came. Maxine’s grandmother has a pre-cancerous cyst. They had a family meeting this week and decided not to treat it with surgery or radiation. And best of all they agreed to leave her in the nursing home. Yesterday Maxine passed the first part of her national EMT test. We were so proud of her. She just has to do the written part now. David’s grandmother broke her back this week. Maxine had so much going on this week. She asked David’s mother to tend the kids Wednesday while she went to class. When she came back the two girls who were David’s brother’s kids cried and didn’t want to leave, so Maxine asked if she could leave them there until the end of the week. David’s sister said she’d have to talk to the mother about it, slammed the door, and never came out again. So Maxine just drove off and left the kids with them. The next day the sister and mother called CPS and reported that Maxine had abandoned the children. So with all she had going on she had to go to Whiteriver and meet with a social worker. She told the social worker what had happened and the social worker said she should just leave the kids with her and she’d find another place for them because the family wasn’t supporting Maxine. So she did. She gave the kids back. David called Robert on Friday and he was furious, but Robert kind of stuck up for Maxine and said he thought it was a bit extreme for the family to report her to CPS. Today it seemed like they had made up and were doing OK. We feel sorry for the kids but felt all along it was too much for Maxine to have two more children to take care of.

We can’t remember if we’d said that Dion and Verbena had their car impounded. They said Verbena was driving without a license or insurance, got pulled over and the police impounded their car. Today Maxine asked if we’d heard about it and we said yes and told her what we’d heard. She said that’s not quite the story she’s hearing around town. She also said nobody gets their car impounded for just driving without a license. Everybody here does that. The rumor is that the police found drugs in the car. Maxine heard that Dion and Verbena have been selling drugs, but if that’s true they’re pretty bad business people. They called us at 10:00 last night and wanted to know if we had a gas can and could pour a little gas in one of their relatives’ cars so they could go to Whiteriver. You’d think if they were selling drugs they could budget better than that. We are very suspicious, however. We think Maxine is right about impounding the car. They wouldn’t do that unless there was some serious offense. And Dion and Verbena have been weird lately. They stay out all night. Dion is working, but Verbena drops him off and then says she goes to Wal-Mart all night shopping. They sleep all day and when we go over they can’t even talk to us. We assumed we had awakened them, but perhaps there’s a little more to it than that. This is beyond disappointing because we thought they were one of the success stories. Guess they are, but for the drug dealers, not for us.