The Live Like Sam Foundation likened people to plants during a presentation at the Wasatch County Library.

“Does anyone have a sad house plant?” asked Programs Director Jessica Parker on Thursday.

A few people gathered in the meeting room — mostly adults — raised their hands. Parents, guardians and other trusted adults had come with their kids for “Bonding Better Together,” a new, free program by Live Like Sam providing activities for intergenerational bonding.

Parker and representatives from the library, Wasatch County Health Department, Wasatch Community Foundation and Wasatch Behavioral Health explained some of the vital components needed for a plant or person to thrive. 

The pot is the support system, providing structure and protection. The sapling sprouting from a little seed represents each person’s inner strength. Soil represents family, and water represents daily, healthy habits. Finally, just as external environments shape a plant, a person’s ability to weather a storm builds character. 

As the speakers explained this, each adult and child pair painted flower pots before filling them with soil and a plant to nurture.

Mother Valeria Cruz came to “Bonding Better Together” with her 15-year-old daughter, Valentina. Valeria is a gardener, and Valentina is currently taking a floriculture course at Wasatch High School.

“We love our plants and spending time out in the garden. It gives you hope in the spring, especially when the weather doesn’t make up its mind,” Valeria said. “It feels really good to be among our peers and neighbors and do something fun.”

Of the two, Valentina was the artist, painting a neon tiger on the side of her flower pot. Valeria, meanwhile, was a self-styled “imitator” who used a stencil to color flowers on the side of her own pot.

The mother and daughter typically bond through conversations on the way to school, whether they be about books, friends or TikTok videos. But the pair weren’t always so close. 

Valeria explained that she used to have more of a mother-knows-best mindset, which she’d inherited from her parents. As Valeria took parenting classes and read books, she realized the road to mutual respect was being receptive to her kids’ critiques.

“The fact that I’m older doesn’t necessarily make me wiser. Even though that’s been hard to admit, it’s also what our relationship needed,” she said. “When I want to improve on something, I rely on their feedback, and I encourage that. And it’s not always easy to hear it, but it’s what makes me connect better with them. And it’s totally worth it. I can leave my ego aside and be like, ‘OK, girl. Give it to me straight.’” 

Like her mother, Valentina also adopted that mindset.

“I felt like I was always right, even though half the time I was wrong. But it didn’t feel good hearing that,” she said. “I think it’s good to just sit down and get your criticism because all your parent really wants to do is help you.”

Valentina said she feels grateful to have the mother she does — it’s one of the healthiest relationships she has.

Valeria’s advice for other parents is simple: “All you have to do is keep them alive, teach them a few skills and then watch them become, because they’re already their own person. As long as you can respect that, I think things flow pretty (well).”

While Valeria acknowledged parenting can be tricky, it can also be fun.

“Moments like today make it all worth it,” she said. “We’re going to go home, and we’re going to have our little memory of what we did and the time we spent together. … She’ll take (the flower pot) to college. I’ll make her.”

“Bonding Better Together” will be held seasonally at Wasatch County Library and will eventually come to Park City Library, according to Parker. Activities will be listed at livelikesam.org/events.

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At 17 years old, Braswell Griffin is already a jack of all trades. 

Comedy is his speciality. He’s filming a series of YouTube videos depicting a satirical news station. But he’s also an avid gamer, singer and actor, currently rehearsing for Wasatch High School’s production of “Mamma Mia!” As part of Wasatch High School’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, he’s an expert at the rifle spinning he does as part of his drills. He’s recently gotten into baking. His aspiration is to animate an indie TV show in the same vein as those made by Glitch Productions, the studio behind viral hit “The Amazing Digital Circus.”

These are just some of the talents Griffin hopes to share through SkillSwap, an initiative launched by his Wasatch High School peer Iris Beijar. The project invites individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder to share their hobbies with each other through online videos posted on a shared YouTube channel.

Beijar, 18, began working on SkillSwap last year as her Girl Scout Gold Award project. The Gold Award is the highest award a Girl Scout can receive and requires 80 hours or more of organizing and executing a service project dedicated to a community issue the scout is passionate about.

Beijar was inspired to create SkillSwap by her 18-year-old brother, Daniel, who has Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a developmental disorder characterized by symptoms including differences in social interaction, communication and sensory processing and a draw toward routine, repetitive behaviors and focused interests. Because autism is a spectrum, it shows differently in each person who has it.

“(Daniel) likes to share his newest weekly obsession with me, whether it’s baking or magic tricks,” Beijar said. “Sharing his skills lights up something in him. And I’ve read a lot about mental health in teens, especially in teens on the autism spectrum, and it’s significantly worse because of a feeling of being different from their peers. So I wanted to give teens and individuals on the autism spectrum a place to build community and develop their strengths, building their self-esteem and confidence.”

Liz Griffin, Braswell’s mother and a speech language pathologist at Wasatch High School, thinks the project could make a real difference. 

“The research shows that people who are neurodivergent, especially people who are on the autism spectrum, they have a different communication style than people who do not. And so they tend to gravitate toward other people who are on the spectrum. The communication is not broken. It’s just a different way to communicate,” she said.

Neurodiversity is an umbrella term for conditions including autism, ADHD, developmental speech disorders and intellectual disabilities. It describes those whose brains function differently from what is considered typical by a society’s norms.

Liz characterized the communication style of many people with autism as more direct or with a flatter affect. She said people with autism may not pick up on social cues or indirect language. 

“My husband came in and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to help me with this?’ I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to help you with that. Oh, you mean you need help with that,’” she recalled. “Autism brains and neurotypical brains are a lot like having an iOS and an Android. … They can communicate with each other. It’s not quite as effective or efficient as when we have an Android to Android or an iOS to iOS. Sometimes, things can get lost in translation.”

In line with that analogy, SkillSwap may be an effective way for people with autism to learn new skills.

“They’re going to access a video with somebody with a similar communication style, somebody that they already feel like they can relate to,” Liz said.

Beijar hosted an event at the Wasatch County Library on Tuesday to pitch the project to interested teenagers with autism. Outside of word of mouth, it was her first in-person attempt to garner interest in SkillSwap, which had not yet received any video submissions.

Although Beijar didn’t expect anyone to show up, she got a turnout of about 15 teenagers, many from Wasatch High School’s Neuro Nest, a club for neurodivergent students that Liz launched at the beginning of this academic year. 

Beijar said that with that turnout, she would like to organize more in-person workshops. She’s thought about organizing an in-person SkillSwap, allowing individuals with autism to gather and share their interests instead of just filming them, but she has not pursued organizing such an event because of potential logistic challenges. 

For now, videos can be submitted to SkillSwap online at tinyurl.com/3ke8dzzt.

Although the introductory workshop was geared toward teenagers, SkillSwap is open to anyone on the autism spectrum.

Beijar is also willing to offer one-on-one help to those needing help filming or submitting a video. Additional questions can be directed to skillshare.teensASD@gmail.com.

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When Angela Edwards was growing up, she lived two blocks away from the library, but after racking up late fees, she wasn’t allowed to take books home. It wasn’t until she was a mother looking to set up a children’s story time in her community of Beaver that she began to see libraries for what they truly were: a sanctuary. 

Edwards is now assistant director of the Wasatch County Library. While much about libraries has changed over her 20-year career, they still serve as sanctuaries, particularly in the year of 2025 when many are spending increasingly more time online. 

Edwards said that libraries are increasingly becoming third spaces where patrons spend hours instead of doing their business and leaving. She’s seen math tutoring, quilting clubs, job interviews, HOA meetings, self-reliance groups and depositions. 

That’s not to say more conventional uses of the library — such as checking out books — aren’t popular as well. The library lent nearly 340,000 items in 2025. 

The most checked-out adult fiction books were all published in 2024 or 2025. Historical fiction dominated the top three: “The Women” by Kristin Hannah, “James” by Percival Everett and “The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion” by Beth Brower. Mystery rounded out the top five with “The God of the Woods” by Liz Moore and “Broken Country” by Clare Leslie Hall.

The most popular young adult series were the usual suspects — “The Hunger Games,” “The Twilight Saga” and “Michael Vey” — and also included Jenny Han’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” the latter of which trended earlier this year after the third season of the TV adaptation was released.

“Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” “Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” were among the most checked-out junior series, but “The Princess in Black” and “Dragon Masters” snuck in there, too. 

Mo Willems swept the picture book category with “The Pigeon Has to Go to School,” “The Pigeon Wants a Puppy” and “The Thank You Book” all in the top three. 

The most checked-out nonfiction books were primarily trending self-help books, such as “The Let Them Theory” and “The Anxious Generation,” and also included the ever-popular Dungeons & Dragons “Player’s Handbook.”

The audiobook of “The Let Them Theory” is an Audible exclusive, meaning the library does not have a copy among its collection of over 477,000 eBooks, eMagazines and eAudiobooks. Edwards said audiobook exclusivity is just one symptom of the way reading has changed over the years.

“When those e-materials first started, it was really slow to gain traction or awareness or even the interest in reading a digital book,” she said. Now, it’s “almost impossible to keep up with demand.”

While physical audiobooks have “decreased significantly in usage,” DVDs remain popular in part because not everyone can afford streaming services or Wi-Fi. 

The library houses almost 68,000 physical books, audios and movies, as well as items like a camcorder, an outdoor movie projector and even a ghost hunting kit — which seems to always be checked out by some brave soul in search of the paranormal.

The library also outfitted its computer lab this summer after receiving a $35,000 grant from the Library Services and Technology Act. The lab now boasts a device that converts VHS and cassette tapes to digital files, a 3D printer and a Vivid-Pix Memory Station, which allows the user to scan anything from a family photograph to grandma’s old teacup and verbally record the history of each item.

As of mid-December, the Wasatch County Library had been visited 96,136 times this year. Since the library is open six days a week, that rounds out to an average of at least 308 visits per day. The number of library cards issued this year, including reissues, was nearly 1,400. 

“I usually do front desk time for two to three hours at a time, and there is not an hour of that time that I don’t give out a new library card,” Edwards said. “So, the growth? We feel it.”

As an independent library instead of a branch of a larger system, the Wasatch County Library faces some challenges in serving our growing community. Hideout residents, for example, are closer to Park City than the library.

“Even though (residents) want (Heber City) to be a small town, change has happened, and it’s here, and we just have to rise to meet it now with our library services,” Edwards said.

Social services remain in high demand. The library’s Snack Shack, which provides free food bags for minors, remains popular, particularly over the summer, when some latchkey kids stay at the library from dawn until dusk.

“When we don’t have (Snack Shack), you see those kids say, ‘There isn’t a snack today?’ … We will send them home with a snack if we can because no one should be hungry,” Edwards said. “That food poverty is really hard to see in a community this large or this wealthy. It shouldn’t happen.”

The library offers everything from visits from therapy dogs to a space for a therapist from Holy Cross ministries to offer free sessions to community members in English or Spanish.

Although the county is certainly growing, the library continues to meet the community’s needs.

When asked what interactions from the year stuck out, Edwards brought up a retired couple. The wife is in too much physical pain to get out of her car, so sometimes, the husband comes in and asks librarians to “make the trek into the stacks” for him. The couple has started using the library’s curbside pickup and OASIS, a service allowing a librarian to deliver books to their house once a week.

“Sometimes he still comes in,” Edwards said. “But it’s been satisfying to know that we could still provide those services, even though they can’t get to us.”

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The creations on display at Wasatch County Library’s annual LEGO Build Contest on Friday proved that anything is possible for a master builder. 

Some builders thought outside of the box, using cotton balls to imitate smoke or wrapping scraps of an old blanket around a LEGO sword to create an elephant’s trunk.

Highlights included dinosaur sanctuaries, war scenes and a concert featuring minifigures of music’s greatest icons: Elvis Presley, Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, Michael Bublé, Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, Luke Combs and Eminem. 

There was even a build of the library itself, which earned the honor of being Young Adult librarian Brittnie Hecht’s favorite entry.

Nine-year-old Carl Johan (CJ) Löfving won first place in the kids’ category for a deadly labyrinth he’s been working on since Halloween, complete with spiders, wolves and a skeletal guard. 

CJ’s only advice to anyone who dared enter the maze was, “You should know that there is a big chance that you will die.”

The proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was a treasure chest full of enough dynamite to make a miner blush.

Aside from drawing, building LEGO is one of CJ’s favorite hobbies.

“We built LEGO when I was pregnant with him, and when he was born, we had all the DUPLOs,” explained his mom, Erica. 

Erica explained that her family is Scandinavian and that CJ was born in Sweden.

Erica, who is a freelance sustainability consultant, appreciates LEGO for its environmental initiatives. She provided LEGO’s introduction of paper-based bags instead of plastic as an example.

“LEGO is actually really good at sustainability. They do a lot of big, high-level work, and they do a lot of testing, too,” she explained. 

Erica also appreciates LEGO for the way it sparks creativity in children and adults. 

She was far from the only one who’s been convinced by LEGO’s “Adults Welcome” marketing campaign. It seems to have worked on 49-year-old Paul McAllister, who won in the adult category for the fourth time — “not that there are a lot of entrants,” he said.

McAllister’s blue ribbon build was a transportable field lab for two scientists. The lab has a hook on top, allowing it to be picked up by LEGO’s Technic VTOL Heavy Cargo Spaceship LT81 set. A product of careful tinkering, the laboratory pod’s lid opens and closes smoothly, and a crank on the side extends and retracts its legs.

“That was a couple of Sundays’ worth of engineering, just sweating there, sitting uncomfortably, figuring out how I was going to do it,” McAllister said.

He even engaged in some illegal building techniques, anarchic methods not sanctioned by the powers that be. McAllister’s greatest sin was drilling a hole into a lunar base plate from a 1983 Base Supply Station set he’s had since he was 8 years old.

It was a necessary sacrifice so he could thread lights from six AAA batteries taped to the bottom of the plate into LEGO gems, making them glow.

McAllister’s father was an electronics engineer, and McAllister works in cybersecurity. For him, the engineering side of LEGO, particularly in their Technic line, is the best part.

“You get to mix imagination with real motion, motors, lights,” McAllister said.

With his kids, McAllister has created around seven “BattleBots.” BattleBots is an online community that uses Technic LEGO parts and miniature motors to create robots that duke it out. 

“We’ve got real damage on our kitchen floor over the past two months,” McAllister said. 

He is thinking about creating and coaching a league of neighborhood kids whom he’s gotten to know through annual “LEGO parties.” Every summer, he’ll invite the whole neighborhood to join him in building a gigantic set.

“We literally will cut the instruction book, the spine of it, and hand it out to the different teams,” McAllister explained. “It’ll still take four hours with 12 or 15 kids to build a huge set.”

According to McAllister, the key to becoming a master builder is organization.

“(My family) spent all of last General Conference, 10 hours and in between, during the breaks, sorting LEGOs,” McAllister said. “All the building happens on the floor because the floor is the natural place to build LEGOs. But it’s clean. We’re building all on trays now. We moved from a terrible situation where you’re stepping on LEGOs right and left to a tidy system.”

McAllister wasn’t always into LEGO. He “fell out of love” with the company around the turn of the millennium, when the sets didn’t excite him. Then, the LEGO Exo-Force series came out. 

“(They’re) giant, Japanese-style robots, and I could not resist,” McAllister said. 

It’s been a steady spiral ever since.

“It’s kind of like skiing. I wasn’t really into skiing, and then I became really into skiing,” he said. “LEGOs, if you just keep buying them, it turns out you end up with a lot of them. … And with a lot of LEGOs, you can do a lot of things.”

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The Summit County Library hosts Terrific Toddler Time, a weekly time for tots to sing, dance and read books, Wednesday morning, June 14, 2017. The event begins at 10:30 a.m. and is open to anyone with a child ages 2-3. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Terrific-Toddler-Time/

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The Summit County Library in Kimball Junction hosted a YouthSpeak event for teens, creating a safe environment for them to express their feelings through poetry, spoken word or song and to receive feedback Wednesday evening, March 29, 2017. The event, which was free and open to the public, awarded first, second, third place and honorable mention prizes to participants. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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Local dog owners and their furry friends took to the Library Field Wednesday afternoon, March 1, 2017.  (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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The snow at Library Field was too good to pass up for some sledders Monday afternoon, Dec. 26, 2016. Nearly 25 children and their parents gathered at the field to partake in some simple, wintertime fun. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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The Park City Library tried out a new program — reading to dogs — on Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 15, 2016. Paws To Read offers children time to come to the library and read to a service dog. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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Children came to the Park City Library to play with and build Lego creations Friday afternoon, August 19, 2016. Throughout the hour, the children, and their parents, were encouraged to build things with Lego or Duplo pieces and to be creative. The weekly club, meeting each Friday from 2-3 p.m., saw as many as 30 children at the height of the summer, but has seen an attendance drop as the start of school draws closer. (Photos by Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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