Juli's mom's visit.

Juli's mom came to visit us from Albania these past few weeks. She first came to Columbus for a week, then flew to Provo to visit Paul and Erka, then flew back here and stayed with us another week. We had such a fun time with her! Her two grandchildren totally adored her - even though they spoke totally different languages! Dituri's English is pretty good, she can understand a lot - so she got along great with the girls. It was especially easy for her to understand Nicole, whose most common phrase had become, "I can do it myself." While she was here we had a little photo session in our living room, and here are some of the pictures:











































One of the highlights of her visit with us was her Albanian cooking! She made us several delicious Albanian dishes, and we loved them all! As you can see in this picture, she is busy rolling out dough for one of her dishes, with Nicole as her constant companion.
















We also took a short drive up to Kirtland, OH, to visit some church history sites with Dituri. It was a great learning experience for us all. It was humbling to see the places where some of the early leaders of our church had revelations that still affect us today.















This room is where the School of the Prophets met. Due to the fact that the leaders would smoke with their clay pipes and spit their tobacco on the ground - for Emma Smith to clean nightly - Joseph Smith went to the room next door and had a revelation we now know as the Word of Wisdom. It was an incredible experience to connect our revelations of those times with our commandments of today.




















Here we are in front of the first LDS temple in this dispensation, the Kirtland temple. It was abandoned soon after most of the LDS members left the area due to persecution, and it is now owned by the Church of Christ (formerly known as the RLDS Church).















We now can look forward to another visit by Nena (grandma) and Gjyshi (grandpa) in the near future!