August 23, 2010

Dear Family,
Happy Birthday Tylie Bug! I forgot to say last week :) I can't believe she's one!
Biggest news: I am staying in Zadar and Sister Nelson is still my companion!
We had zone conference meeting thing on Tuesday and President did "Box B" with us. Which means that we were all sitting in the room and he called out everyone's transfers right in front of everybody else! It was so fun! Usually we just get a call and then we have to hear through the grapevine where everyone else got called, but he just told us all right there! It was fun. The term "Box B" has history, President said that in the olden days everyone would go to the Tabernacle to get their mission calls, instead of getting letters, and so they would call out your name and where you're going and you'd go over to Box B and get some details about everything, so they called it Box B, and it was fun with transfers.
There are always some surprises with transfers - like they're taking the sisters out of Varaždin this transfer and putting them in Zagreb, so there will be four sisters in Zagreb this transfer and they're all living in the same apartment! Two elders are leaving Zadar, so we'll only have a set of Elders and a set of Sisters. And we're getting new missionaries, so we found out who's training and Elder Rhodes, who is the branch president here, will be training this transfer, so we're getting a greenie right into Zadar and he's 7 feet tall! And Elder Rhodes is one of the shortest missionaries in our mission, so it's going to be the tallest missionary with the shortest, and here in Zadar basketball is the most popular sport ever, and there are a bunch of tall people, it's like a trademark thing for Zadar, so this new Elder is going to fit right in, it's really exciting to us. I don't think I ever told you, I meant to forever ago, but the way that the gospel came to Croatia is through a basketball player, Krešimir Čosić, who played at BYU and then got baptized in Utah, and he's FAMOUS here. EVERYONE knows Krešo, we hear about him all the time and the basketball stadium here is called the Krešo dome and so we're thinking that Elder 7-Foot is going to create a lot of publicity and excitement for the church here. It's AWESOME.
We also got 2 new investigators this week, we passed one off to the Elders and the other one is living here for only a couple more weeks until school starts, she attends in Zagreb, so we'll get to pass her off to the sisters there when she does, which is really exciting because I have only had 3 new investigators total since I've been here, and TWO were this week. We do have other investigators, just not ones that I've found. And actually, the girl we didn't find, the Elders found and passed her to us, but we taught the first lesson and will teach her again tonight. Anyway :)
Oh yeah, I did get the letter that Mom sent, Thanks! I loved the pictures, Dad's land in Blanding is really nice, and it was fun to get colorings from the kids and Jesse :) And I got a ton of pictures in e-mails this week from ya'll -- the kids are all growing up so fast! I thought Jude especially looked older, thanks Dad for the pics, in one of them Jude looks just like the fake computer baby that we made at the baby shower! Really. All grown up.
I can't believe the U.S. Open starts soon. I saw a kid wearing a Roger Federer hat the other day and I wanted to ask him where he got it, but he was on a bike.
That's really cool that Lauren Laws went to the MTC, if someone could send me her addresses that would be great!
Hope everyone has a great week and all that jazz! Love you tons!
Sister Laws