Nov. 22, 2015
Happy Thanksgiving!
We’re meeting at Kent / Heidi’s this week. The annual celebration is getting smaller: only 28 people this year, but we’re looking forward to being with family. We’re in charge of mashed potatoes again, but might slip in some fufu to see if anyone notices :)
There is a coed volleyball team that has started at the high school, and Pace decided he wants to try it. I went with him to the first practice to see what it’s like, and there are some really good players. He’s excited, which is a good thing, but we’ll see how it goes.
Mom has been saving her money from various projects, and treated me to a mattress shopping date. We spent the afternoon lying on various beds to see how we felt about this or that mattress. It was a little weird, but fun. Prices went from $199 to over $4600. At about $400, we could feel a tremendous difference between our current mattress and the newer technologies, so I was excited to take a $4600 7th wonder of the world mattress for a test lie. Meh. Like so many other things, you can spend a lot of money for very little return.
Drew commented this week that “Isaac doesn’t talk as much as he used to.” Apparently he hasn’t noticed you’re missing? We’re still trying to get inside his head and figure him out.
Davis spent the evening in bed because he was grossed out by some unique texture in his chicken and wouldn’t finish dinner. I wonder where he’s going on his mission.
Porter played in the Jazz Swing Dance dinner / fundraiser. The menu seems to have gotten stuck somewhere in committee. Baked potatoes and chili. We missed you and your friends. Mom, Sadie and Drew danced a lot. Pace and I observed a lot, which was a good balance. I did ask Mom to dance on a slow song where we could waddle in a circle. It was my speed. Hugging in public. Much better than trying to count my steps, rubbing my head and patting my stomach. Mom always says I look like I’m in pain when I try to dance. Mrs Prader danced. She didn’t look like she was in pain.
After the dinner, Porter brought home three 10 lb bags of baked potatoes. They were the consistency of saddle leather, after having been under the warming lamps for 4 hours. This is after bringing home the last round of baked potatoes from his benefit dinner / auction to help the kids with cancer. We decided to try eating them as battered french fries. We mixed 2 cups of flour, 1 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp onion powder, 3 tsp salt, 1 cup 7up, and about 2 cups of water to make the batter, cut the potatoes in to strips, and deep fried the battered potatoes. They were awesome! It turns out that 10 lbs of awesome is less awesome. Gut rocks. Still, we were dreading the thought of trying to eat all those extra fundraiser potatoes. This was probably the most appetizing method.
It snowed this week and stuck. Tad went camping on Friday night and it got down to 6 degrees (colder with windchill). Then we noticed that the temperature in Kumasi was 87, but felt like 107. Sorry. Sleep spread eagle and use your baby powder.
Sadie is in Pep now, and goes into Ms Smith’s for math. She loves it, on both counts. All her friends are in Ms Smith’s class (seems the school was aware of that), so she has been reunited with Rachel and Kaylin. We’ll see how Pep works out, but she’s loving the project / new nature of the class.
Grandpa got his knee replaced this week, and is home doing well. We’ll go down sometime around Christmas and finish bringing the rest of the stuff back (canoes, furniture, stuff).
We’re excited to hear how this week has gone. Our perception of your last email was “it’s pretty early to have a good sense of what’s going on”, so we’re looking forward to your letter after having a full week under your belt.
This week’s advice: Trust and love your senior companion. Don't be impatient or critical. Try to work together as a team and be supportive. See what they do really well, and actively try to learn from their best traits. Remember that you have no idea what it is like for a senior companion to train a new missionary, so be patient, humble and supportive.
We love you and look forward to your letter.
Dad
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