February 28

Hey Kade,

Been thinking about you a lot and hoping you are doing well.  Have you been responding directly to people who email you or send you stuff?  I know Judy has sent you several packages so I hope you are thanking her and writing them. Grandma Harris keeps telling me she hasn't heard from you. She said she sent you a Valentine. Did you get our Valentine package? Jana says she wants me to add Andrew to your email list.

We made it back from California. It was 4 days of driving and 3 days of actually being there.  It was fun but the driving part was not.  Kyler and Talmage really liked the beach and we stayed in a nice motel that dad's work paid for, the Hampton. But we were pretty cramped all in one room with 2 queen beds.  Dad was in his class all day so he didn't get to do anything. I think the kids liked the beach the best. Ky and Tal liked playing in the sand. It felt really hot there but the ocean was really cold.

We have tons of laundry and clothes full of sand and now the dryer isn't working. Hopefully dad can fix it tomorrow.

Shanee is very stressed about her school work so hopefully she will feel better about it tomorrow after talking to her teachers.

In church today brother Watkins the seminary teacher was the only speaker in sacrament meeting. He talked about missionary work. He is the ward mission leader.  He talked about that we need to first work on ourselves getting closer to the Savior and then pray about who we can be friendly with and invite and think about how we can do that.  They want our whole ward to work on that this year.  He talked about how if you had breakfast at someone's house and they had fresh squeezed orange juice but they never offered you any. And you asked if you could have some and they said "Oh, I thought you didn't like orange juice and I didn't want to offend you by offering it to you." Of course, that is silly but that is how the book of mormon is.  It is sweet to us and  is to others too, we just need to offer it to them. He also made up another analogy about an old piano being bought by a family and being tuned and how it benefited not just their family but others as well as the family learned to play the piano more beautifu lly.  We are like the piano, when we work on ourselves to draw closer to Christ, we are tuning ourselves. And sharing the music with others is like sharing the gospel. 

They asked me to be the Beehive advisor today so I will be having a new calling. I have been in cubscouts with Kyler and that has been pretty easy. Young womens will be a lot more work but I will be with Shanee more so thats good. I have been worried about her going to girls camp this year without me so I guess that won't be a problem.  She still is struggling with being able to eat on her own.  I don't know what to do about her.  Keep praying for her

Love  you! Mom

From Talmage:  Dear Kaden, I have been at California. I saw pigeons. They ate my bagel and the pigeons fighted over the bagel with the seagulls. I love you!

From Kyler: Dear Kaden, When we went to California this week we went to the city of Los Angelas. We went to Knotts Berry Farms and they have lots of roller coasters. And my favorite one was this one that spun around like the Samurai. It was really fun and there was also this really fun one called the Silver Bullet and I went on it. And it was kind of like The Bat except it went upside down two or three times. And there was also one called the Accelerator and it went really fast. And it just shot up in the air and you could see lots from up there. And we went to the beach and I built a giant sand castle and Talmage did and  Shanee. And Shanee did body boarding and the water was kind of cold.In the water we found lots of shells. Cool shells. At church I got a prayer rock and I think its cool. When we drove to Los Angelas at St George I saw a big hare when we went hiking and dad went biking while we went hiking. And our hotel was really nice. It had a swimming pool and a hot tub and it had heated jets in the hot tub. And mom gave us licorice. And then mom got us a giant drink. At Knotts Berry Farm there is this ride callled the Boomerang that went up this hill backwards really slow and then it got really high up and then it shot us and then we went backwards twice upside down. I love you!


This week they officially split the area of sunnyside so now we don't get to go through the whole city so now I am on the Eastern half of sunnyside. The sister missionaries have come and they got to take about 3/4s of the people that we were teaching, but that is good cause we had so many people that we had to get to and see, so we weren't able to focus on anybody. We were able to get a lesson in with the Davila family, we put there mom and 2 of her kids on date for baptism on march 30, but yesterday their whole family of 11 people came to church, and they all seem like they are pretty solid people so we will probably be able to get them all on date for March 30, which would be pretty awesome to get 11 people baptized all on the same day. We also got a referral from the Spanish elders of a family, they were named Ricardo and Tanya, we had a really good lesson with them and we put them on date for May 7, but we will probably be able to push their date a lot sooner. On Friday we were trackting an apartment complex and we saw a really tall black dude that ran over to us screaming that he was part of our church, and he wanted to prove it so he showed us his temple recommend, his name was Kingsley and he is from Nigeria, and we are thinking about taking him out to some lessons which would be really cool. He said that his favorite part about being in this church was that no matter where he went the church was done the exact same way. Our ward missionary just posted a bunch of pictures of the new sister missionaries and apparently there have been a ton of people that were complaining and saying that they wanted the Elders to come back and teach them because they were more fun and less awkward. Thanks for all of the valentines day packages, and it sounds like you guys had a really good time at the beach in California.