week 9 – pics galore!

Nov 30, 2015

First major holiday away from us…and it is good, really, really good to think about our girly going out into the world and spreading joy and love on Thanksgiving day. She sounds so happy and fulfilled and THAT makes my heart explode with joy. Seriously, this missionary mama thing is the best! Super exciting this week is that she set up a Dropbox account and sent us a ton of pictures!

She is in a beautiful area!

Giant oranges…yummy!

Glad to see her desk is a bit cleaner than her one here at home.

How sweet are these notes? A member must have left them some treats with a note of thanks for their hard work.

She got to go to the temple with a girl in her mission who is about to leave on her own mission.

Blythe and her companion, Sister Shumway, at the temple.

Love this Star of David Seal of Melchizedek on the Newport Beach Temple!

And here is her letter:

The time is going way too fast. I can’t believe I’m almost 3 months in. I feel like I just got here, at the same time feeling like I’ve always been here.

This week has been amazing! In 5 days we picked up 6 new investigators, which, especially for this mission, is nothing short of miraculous. Several of them are families and we’re always shooting for that. We have a huge list of people to work with and we’re kept busy. We have been very blessed lately with people to work with.

Thanksgiving was really good. Bishop Owens’ family (his daughter lives in the ward) always go down to the Marine Base and have two Marines come spend Thanksgiving with them, which I may have already mentioned. So he really likes the missionaries to come over for a while and talk with them. It was an interesting experience for me, being our same age but with the military haircuts and talking about drills and stuff. They were pretty cool though and we stayed over there for a while. Their names were Josh and Chris. It was a new experience getting to know them.

We also went to Raquel’s. She’s Filipino and her whole family was there. She has 9 siblings, I think, though maybe a few more, and her parents were there, and all her siblings’ children and all her children. And they were all similar ages, since her younger siblings overlap with some of the older siblings’ kids. They span from 33ish to 10, but it’s really hard to tell how old they really are. Her mom still looks pretty young. They introduced all the kids at the same time, and whose child they were and it was just fun and a little crazy. They have a really fun family. I really enjoyed it! Kenny, (Raquel’s brother) has a really good voice, and his whole family just loves hearing him sing, so after some friendly pressuring he sang for us. He sang “I Stand All Amazed” and an upbeat song that I didn’t recognize (big surprise). He was super good and that visit was just really fun. They also had this Filipino dish called cevici or something – shrimp and fish in something like salsa. It was yummy.

Since we couldn’t go visit many people since they were having family time, we also went through our whole list and left little notes for them and a couple people have replied to us about those. A bunch of people in the ward just got mission calls. One of the Mauss girls is going to South America, there’s another girl who’s up at school, and a guy is going to Japan. They’re all just dying with excitement, so that was fun for us. I got to go to Hollie Mauss’ endowment since they invited us and we’ve been working with her. She helps us a lot with missionary work, so we got permission to go.

This week should be really great. We have a lot to invite people to as they start all this Christmas stuff.

Love you!!!!!
Sister W.