Elisabeth #6 Birthday Date, South Africa Slides, Lehmans, Valentines Cookies, Wrestling and a Chocolate Extravaganza!

This has been a fun week! Last Friday we got up early and headed to North Carolina. We had made arrangements with Ryan to have a birthday date with Elisabeth- her first one ever!  This is one of the blessings of being called to serve in Ohio! Where she used to be 2,000 miles away, she is now only 450 miles away! We have never been able to have a birthday date with her, so we appreciated Ryan and Lea sharing their birthday weekend with Elisabeth with us.  We picked Katie and Elisabeth up in Christiansburg and had a fun ride to Huntersville. We arrived in time for a yummy birthday dinner with a Moana birthday cake and opened presents. We played and then the next morning took Elisabeth to breakfast (chocolate chip pancakes) and then to a very fun Children’s museum, where we played until noon.  After a fun lunch, we left the celebration and headed back to Ohio.  Driving 900 miles  in 30 hours for a birthday date with Elisabeth was worth everything! Such a fun day!

We had so much snow the next day that church was cancelled, and so we spent the day catching up on studying, reading, writing and our missionary planning. Paul even had to shovel a little path for his squirrels to their feeder, he is such a softie! 

This has been a very snowy winter, one of the coldest, iciest and snowiest for several years.  So grateful for a warm home, warm car and warm clothes! 

The sad thing is that church has been cancelled twice and we also cancelled institute this week.  The missionary Sisters and we invite people to church and then it is cancelled, it makes it kind of hard on the missionary work!  But they are planning on baptizing LuAnne Sims three grandchildren in two weeks, which is very fun!

The previous week we did have a fabulous lesson on the Prodigal Son and what we can learn from both sons and the father.  We even had a mock family council with our class to see what we could do to help the Prodigal Son's family! 

Monday night we hosted our monthly Empty Nester Family Home Evening and after our lesson by Sister Rain Smith, we showed Paul’s slides of his missionary safari in Africa, and again a big hit! We love those pictures! Warm peach cobbler topped off the evening!

We went to Lehman’s store, in Amish country, which is on our bucket list this week after making a trip to the Social Security office to get some documentation for our taxes.  It is a bit of a challenge to live so far away from Utah and our accountant, but we got everything we needed and had a fun visit to a very famous Ohio store!

We invited Heather Page’s children in this week for dinner, valentine cookie making and the sisters taught them a lesson on the Priesthood. It was a fun evening!

We continue to host lots of missionary discussions and meals in our home, which is very enjoyable.  The sisters do not tract, they only teach, and often they  bring their investigators here to be taught, or we go with them.  They are very busy! We also are helping Tom, a new member prepare family history names to take to the temple next week! 

We also learned that Devin Klein won the coach of the year award in wrestling, and we took him a little congratulation treat! He then invited us to come to senior night at the high school and watch a meet that he coached and then see the seniors as they received their awards, one of which was Danita's boy Braiden. Chip and Terri, Ryan, Devin and Lindy and their kids, Danita, Braiden and Katie were all there!  It is always very special time when we get to visit with any of the Klein family, they are such wonderful people! 

And President and Becky went with us, which was the best!

We volunteer in the community in as many ways that we can! On Saturday, The Pomerene Center for the arts was hosting their 26th annual chocolate extravaganza and we asked if we might be of help. Paul was the greeter and Kim got to serve. What a blast helping serve the most amazing chocolate desserts donated by many many fabulous cooks for about 3 hours to hundreds of people! People would buy a ticket and get to choose one  slice of the assortment of incredible cheesecakes,  one slice of the many cakes and three other smaller dessert.  They were all amazing! Works of art!
We got to meet lots of new people and see many of the friends we have already made!
With our purchases (and another bunch donated to us by our neighbor) we delivered yummy treats to many of our community neighbors and friends! 
What a delicious way to do missionary work!