September 13, 2010

Hi family!
Good to hear from you. Especially from my sisters - you're all moms and your kids are all so cute! Thank you for the pictures and updates! I love seeing and hearing about your spawn.
It was great to see the ultrasound and hear that Amelia is due on March 23, it's exciting and it's really going to happen! There's a baby in there!
Kelsey, that hike sounded like it went great! Just kidding, but it's fun to hear your crazy stories, I liked the one about you waking up to Austin laughing at the movie you were watching. That's really funny.
And Jesse, Jude sounds so cute! He's got such personality already, making noises and smiling at everything. It's so much fun for me to hear about them all.
Thanks for updating me on tennis. Sigh. It's not like Roger Federer losing in the semi-finals is the end of the world, though. It's cool that Djoković is in the final, or was in the final, actually, with the time difference I can't tell if the final has happened yet. Anyway, that's cool, because he's from Serbia! I don't know if the Croatians will be happy or sad if he wins, though. I would think they'd be happy, because it's former yugoslavia and it's another small slavic country, but it is Serbia. There's a good chance I won't even hear anything about it, though.

So what have I done this week? We taught a record high number of lessons! For me anyway, not for the mission or the area or Sister Nelson or anything like that. Just for me. It's good to be teaching more and good to be understanding more! And participating more! The language is coming, and it's great! I love Croatian. Some days I don't, but for the most part I do.

I tripped this week. We were walking through a rocky dirt field type thing, and there was a small round metal thing, I stepped on it with one foot and the other foot caught the edge and I fell! Scraped my hand up and bruised my leg, but nothing really serious. It's just funny. Luckily no one was really around to see it. Sister Nelson didn't even see it, because she was walking ahead of me.

And we started another round of English classes this week, we're teaching beginners and we have 5 old people coming! It's funny, because a couple of them know zero English, and we get to walk them through everything step by step, very slowly. But it's good to have a bigger class.
Oh! We met some kids, a 13-year old and 12-year old boys, and the 12-year-old reminded me of Brent a TON. He was like a mini Brent. Same build, dark hair, same face kinda, and when he talked had some of the same whatchacallems: like he shrugged and shifted his feet the same way that Brent sometimes does. mannerisms, some of the same mannerisms. It was crazy. They were good kids, they wanted the Book of Mormon! It was cool, but we didn't have any and so we told them to come to church yesterday to get copies and they didn't. We know where one of them lives, so hopefully we can get in touch with them again.

Love you all!
Sister Laws

Hey Mom, for some reason I can't remember for definite if you were Catholic before or not. I'm pretty positive that you were, so I'm wondering if you remember some of the ceremonies that they do, like communion and stuff, and if you could tell me a little bit about that, like what age, what it's for, when you "received the Holy Ghost" itd.

We're just trying to better understand these people!
And one of the recipes you gave me asks for something weird, I can't remember what it was... I can't remember the word... coleslaw. One recipe requires coleslaw stuff, what's something that I could substitute that for? Or how do I make that? Because we don't have anything exactly like that here.
Thanks! Love you tons!