This Week at Our House # 40

1. John had his 46th birthday!!!! He is now onto the second half of the 40's decade. I think that even comes as a bit of a shock to John. In 4 years time, he will be 50. But we do not feel old. John is fat, but he is strong and exercises daily. I don't think we have slowed down in our physical activity much at all.
2. On Monday, I got to take the sister missionaries in our area to the beach. The daughter of a sister missionary that I spent a lot of time with during my senior year of high school is here in the ward that meets after ours. I am sure it is a tender mercy to be able to spoil the daughter of a friend who did a lot of good in my life. We still have not closed on the house. This week, I realized that I had to be on the phone every day with the loan agents and making sure they were putting things through. It's been a very frustrating process, but they finally got everything submitted and approved us for the loan. We sign papers on Monday and the closing is supposed to be officially scheduled for Friday.
3. What I heard about Ruth, I put in her own post. I think she is following the Spirit and working hard as we directed. 
4. Poor Kate hates bugs and there are these terrifying giant red roaches here. I heard her go into my bathroom, yell, "A roach!" Then I heard bang, crash, slam, and then, "Oh please stop moving, your head is cut off."
5. Johnny's online seminary class has been so good. It is great to have more sleep. Johnny helps a lot with home school. He teaches piano and grades math and will do the afternoon classes when I have to run errands, and all that is in addition to his own work which often takes him until 4 or 5 o'clock. Johnny became the cleanup champ this week. I have not had anyone just go and wash the dishes and clean up after dinner since Ruth left without being told to do so. Johnny did that three times this week.
6. Adam is getting faster at reading. He is making his 50 pages earlier in the day now. Becoming a very good reader and learning to love to read is his goal for this school year.
7. Rachel took a pretty good spill off of her bike and could not go to the beach with the sister missionaries. I think she would have really enjoyed that. But Rachel is mostly pretty happy with life.
8. Anya has been working on her drawing. I noticed in church today that she started a picture of a face by drawing the guide lines.
9. Joseph came with me to the beach with the sister missionaries and went on a walk with me this week, and  for the first time in his life, stayed close to me, did not run when I told him he couldn't, and came when he was called. 
10. Joshua told the sister missionaries that he loved them several times when we were on our trip.
11. Our beach trip was a non-swimming trip because we had the sister missionaries, but the water was warm and everything was perfectly beautiful and Arwen went right into the water and had a lovely time. She did end up with a lot of sand in her hair, so Kate helped her to hold her head  in the water to rinse it out. Arwen continues to say the cutest things. One evening, Arwen came inside, grabbed my hand and said, "You have to see the sky. It is beautiful. The colors are so different!"
12. Susan woke Kate and Rachel up at 1 am by having a tea party on their bedroom floor. And that is very Susan. That girl will not go to bed at night. When we move, she will only have to share a room with Samuel and we are all glad about that.
13. Sam is still taking 2 to 3 steps at a time and then dropping down to crawl. He says mama and uh oh. While I was changing his diaper, he heard some kids arguing over a clean up in the other room, looked toward the door and said, "Uh, oh" and then some baby talk. Sam loves to play peek a boo. He will come up to me and put my hands over my face. 

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Stories From Ruth # 3

We went down to Seven Kings for exchanges with the STLs, Sister Lamb and Sister Barnes! They are both so amazing and Faith filled. The spirit is strong when they speak. I went with Sister Lamb and we went bus contacting on the way to the church for an appointment. We taught this guy and he recognized the truth and agreed to go to general conference and take a friend! It was exciting! It was a crazy busy day and I learned a lot from Sister Lamb about not being afraid to testify of the truths of the gospel and of the Book of Mormon! 

 Sister Lamb was an amazing example of always testifying of the truth of the gospel, and even after a person turned us down, she testified of eternal families and then they paused, and talked to us about the gospel. They even made a return appointment. 

The spirit is strong when we testify boldly of the truths of the gospel like eternal families and the truth of the Book of Mormon. On the bus home I felt like I needed to sit on my own with an open seat. On the next stop a lady sat next to me. We talked and she asked me what I did so I told her. Then she asked if there was a church nearby and I gave her the address. She asked for the contact information and then before I asked her anything said she would take her kids and would come. I felt and knew the Lord had prepared her. It was nothing I did or said. 

We went home to Cambridge the next day and have seen miracles since. Both of us have talked to more people, opened up scriptures in every conversation, and have testified more. The miracles have come since. We met a girl from China named Susan. She is so sweet and is a math teacher at one of the like four colleges here. Susan is excited to read the Book of Mormon and wants to pray and take the time to learn for herself if it's true by study and prayer! She was excited to talk to us when we stopped her, because she had been wondering about Christianity and how she could come to know that it was true! 

We texted every investigator contact on the phone inviting them to general conference and to teach them. We have gotten a few investigators from that who are generally interested. One grew up Hindu and didn't believe it, but when the sisters before taught him, he felt a pull towards it, and felt like it was true. He moved home during the break and came back and is genuinely interested to come to know for himself that God and Jesus Christ are real and that this is his gospel. He agreed to be baptized if he found out it was true. He has a hope and he agreed to continue to act on that hope. It's interesting though because he is very intelligent but humble enough to recognize that even though he had never believed in a God before, that it is true, and he has a heavenly father. He asked a question about since God is a God of order and authority then where did God get his authority, and I felt prompted to remember a scripture I felt like I had needed to memorize. 

John 3:12 "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" 

We don't know all the things of God, and won't unless we first believe the foundation. If we do not believe the things God has told us now, doubt them, or place them aside for the knowledge of this world, God will never tell us of heavenly things. If we do not understand basic addition and subtraction we will never be able to understand a calculus equation. I know that this is true for everyone. We have to be ready to accept and act upon whatever answer we receive from God and only then will we receive answers.

Sunday morning we got a text from an investigator named Chris saying he was coming to church. Turns out he had never even had a lesson with the missionaries before, so his first introduction to the church was the Priesthood Session of general conference. Afterwards Chris turned to us and told us that he had been looking for a church like this all his life. He felt a pure peace when he listened to the general authorities in the church and he knew they had that in their life. He wants the same peace in his life and has agreed to meet with us. We stayed an hour after for a lesson with him in which he told us that he had first heard of the Mormons because he studied American politics, and he had noticed the peace Mitt Romney always had in every debate, and in his life. Then he looked up and discovered that he was Mormon. Because of this, when the sister missionaries talked to him on the street he gave them his number, but the sisters were pulled out after that and never got to meet with him. Hopefully Chris and his wife will be able to come to church! Thank you Mitt Romney! Hahaha!

This Week at Our House # 39

1. We have General Conference which we all love. On getting my kids to listen and behave during General Conference, I have tried a lot of things over the years from coloring pages to sending them off to play in a different room to lots of snacks-- making general conference a big party-- to putting up names and pictures of the apostles and having the kids plaster them with sticky notes of the notes they took. But in the long run, the thing that has made the biggest difference in their ability to pay attention is doing a daily 45 minute or longer family scripture study. It's a daily battle, but when it comes to General Conference, the kids are seasoned listeners, all of them. For the last 2.5 to 3 years, I have done nothing other than a small snack, the kids excitedly gather because they have learned to love General Conference and even the 5 and under kids tend to sit quietly through most of the 8 hours. Now for John, he has taken up bike riding with Joseph and Adam and I think they enjoy it.
2. I had a bureaucratic busy week between being asked for more and more paper work for the house and trying to get the car registered. We still don't even have an official closing date, though they have everything they need. I am trying not to be critical, but I have a collection of crazy stories from their incompetence. The car did not get registered either because I remembered too late in the month and suddenly the cracked tail light that got cracked 7 years ago is not going to pass inspection like it did for the last 6 years, and it takes several days to get one shipped here. It looks like I am in for another week of annoying bureaucracy.
3. I woke up to a lovely email from a Sister Westenskow, one half of the couple missionaries in Ruth's area. She told me that Ruth came prepared and that she helped without being told during a lunch. That did sound like Ruth.
4. It was lovely to have Kate home. She is my companion and the kids playmate and the baby's nap place. I missed hearing her play the hymns everyday and it was nice to have those playing throughout the house again.
5. Johnny got another 29 on the ACT, so he is done and won't bother again. His foot is almost better-- still wearing the shoe-- so I  asked him to mow the ditch. It was soggy and the grass was long from being flooded for a good month, but he did a fantastic job. Our new house is set nearly 400 ft from the road, so we will have no ditches to mow. Hurrah!
6. Adam is just so big and strong. The three kids older than him, were so tiny at 12 and 13. Adam is huge in comparison, but probably more normal compared to other kids.
7. Susan steals food after she is sent to bed at night and brings it to her room and then often sleeps with it in Rachel's bed. This brings a trail of ants into Rachel's bed. Rachel is very, very patient about this. In fact, she hasn't ever gotten angry with Susan over it and she has saved her complaining for my ears. This morning Rachel cleaned up a cookie and ant mess from her bedroom floor as soon as she saw it. I think Miss Rachel is growing up.
8. Anya stayed home from a birthday party because she wanted to play with Joseph. I love how much my kids love each other and what good friends they are. I think the relationships they  build now will be a huge blessing for them as adults.
9. Joseph had an hard time with school this week. He has so much energy. But he does push through, and he does know his stuff.
10. One of Joshua's beginning reader books starts with "Mom and Dad had 10 tens kids." It shows a pictures of these 10 tiny kids all about the same age. The first time Josh saw it, he exclaimed, "Wow! That is a lot of kids!" I laughed and asked him how many kids we had in our family, and he said, "I don't know, a lot, I think." I told him that we had 11 and he said, "That is a lot of kids!"
11. Arwen is now afraid to go to the bathroom by herself because of bugs. She will come to me looking desperate saying she really has to go to the bathroom but she is too scared. I then tell Suzy to take Arwen to the bathroom. Suzy gets excited, grabs Arwen by the hand and leads her to the bathroom. It's hilarious! Arwen had a tiny scrape that she was crying about. John was looking for it, and having trouble finding it, because it was that small. Joseph had fallen off his bike into the rock part of the neighbor's ditch and had a large nasty scratch. Dad compared Joseph's big scrape to Arwen's little one and she said, "They're almost not the same. Ok, Joseph's is bigger."
12. Joseph was playing plants vs Zombies and he had it connected to the big tv. I was sitting on the floor playing skipbo with Anya. Suddenly, Susan laid her head in my lap and said, "I'm scared, mom. Help me." Poor little girl. I have been thinking that we may need to clean up some of the gruesome from our home. We don't have much, bu if it is scaring our babies, it does not need to be here. Arwen and Susan were wrestling each other over a little dinosaur they both wanted. Susan won out because I told Arwen to get off Susan, so Arwen gave up the fight. About an hour later, Joseph brought the cat into the house. Susan popped up, put the little dinosaur into Arwen's hand and went to get the cat.
13. Sam took his first two steps this week, but that is all he will take. He takes one or two steps and then drops down and crawls away quickly.

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