March 6

Hi Kade,

I need you to write our family a seperate letter because we aren't getting anything personal from you.  We want to know the good and bad and your feelings.  It is really hard for me to have you gone.  I miss you a lot and think about you all the time, and of course I  cry  a lot because I miss you and don't know that much about what is going on with you.  So please write us a seperate letter then what you send out to everyone else you know. Just send us both letters and in the letter to us tell us some more personal details. I know you have limited time on the computer but I think you can do it! :)  And we are the ones who love you the most and are the most interested in what you are doing and how you are.
And when you send pictures tell us what they are of.  I was really worried that you had been in an accident when I saw the car with the broken windshield. So tomorrow I expect to read a much more detailed letter with some feelings and experiences in it from you!

Not much has been happening this week.  I scrapbooked with Andria on Friday and saw your pictures from your farewell and from pizza pie cafe.  It was really sad for me to see them.  I haven't seen Andria in a long time so it was good to visit with her.  Damon's girlfriend is dating someone else now so I think he is heart broken.  Andria is very sad about Tayten and she says she can feel his sadness from the spirit world about what he has done.  He feels sad and angry about killing himself and is sad about leaving his daughter and not being able to hold her or be there for her when she grows up. She feels his sadness so intensely that it is hard for her to feel happiness but she needs to and she wants to move on and wants him  to move on.  In her prayers she is praying to tell him to choose to move on and grow in the spirit world.  I have never thought about it like that before but we have free agency in the spirit world just like we do here.  And when we die we will still have to deal with our problems. I hope she feels peace soon and that he will start to learn and grow and progress in the spirit world. He will need the missionary discussions up there too.

How are your investigators doing and Tanya and her son doing?  And the family of 10?

In church today Brother Walker bore his testimony and he quoted President Hinckley when he was interviewed on national television by Mike Wallace who asked him if we believe that God talked to a 14 year old boy and President Hinckley said "yes, that's the miracle of it. God uses the unlikely to accomplish his miracles."  He talked about if we had a  business would we trust 18 year olds to do the work that we needed done. Most people would not do that but God does.  And you are doing awesome!   I am so proud of you and amazed at your hard work that you and your companion are doing.  I want to hear from you about your testimony and personal experiences that you have had.

It has been warming up a little this week and it has felt so nice to feel the sun.  Yesterday we went on a bike ride to the Willard bay dike for Shanee to run on.  Me, Kyler and Talmage went and about a mile into it we all had flat tires from all the stickers. But Shanee kept running and I had no idea where she was so I was pretty worried and frustrated for an hour.  I was worried she would just keep running around the whole thing.  Talmage found some mud and got totally stuck in it. His shoes were stuck and his bike so stuck that he couldn't get out.  I swear that kid can find mud anywhere. He has  been outside digging his "river" for a week. That is all he wants to do all day long. Even when its dark outside he tries to go out there.

Kyler and Talmage have been playing with  barbie dolls with their friend Sam.  I never thought I would see them do that. They are really silly. The barbies are married to the Hulk or Iron man or spider man.   

Love you Kaden and I'm so proud of you! Be safe and know that we love you so much! Love Mom

From Talmage:  Dear Kaden, we have moved the chicken coop. I like to look at it. I like making cookie dough. I make sugar cookie dough because it doesn't have eggs and I can just eat the dough. .....................................................................................................................:

From Kyler: Today at church we did a crossword puzzle and it was really hard in our sunday school class. For scouts we had to make a maze for a marble to go through. Me and Sam made up this game that was so much fun. In the game there is this guy and the guy gets money every night he survives. He gets $10 every night for surviving. And you can buy stuff with it and you make this base and weapons and you fight each other.

This week has been going by pretty fast, we haven't had too much luck with finding new people to teach, and since the area split the new sister missionaries took almost all of our investigators. We had a really good lesson with a woman named Phyllis and she has a really strong testimony of our church and has asked us to give her a priesthood blessing but she still doesn't want to join it yet, she says that she just takes a long time for her to "get things". This week all four of us in the apartment got food poisoning and I felt really hung over for the rest of the next day, we think that it was some tamales that we had from a member family in the spanish branch, one thing I have learned on my mission is to never buy anything from fiestafoods, because their food will almost always get people sick. The weather here has been really nice it has been about 75 degrees and sunny everyday. Tanya got really sick as well and she apparently had to go to the hospital so she hasn't been able to come to church for the last 2 sundays, so that sucks. The Davila family moved to Mabton which is out of our mission and is in the kennewick mission, so we are going to have to get special permission from the mission president before they can get baptized in our ward, the church has so many dumb rules that make no sense if you think about it, like for example with the davilas they are going to have to be baptized in the prosser ward which is another 30 minutes further than the sunnyside ward is. I just think if the church really cared about people's "salvation" they wouldn't let an imaginary ward boundary keep them from baptizing them and keep us from being able to teach them. This is why my companion and I have left the mission a few times so that we can still go over and teach them, our ward mission leader knows and he agrees with us, we just have to make sure that no other missionaries find out otherwise we could get in a lot of trouble. My favorite person that I have ever met on my mission is named Leo he is a drug dealer and he lives right next door to us, every time I see him he has a joint in his mouth and asks me if I want any weed. We talked to him yesterday and he said that he sold someone some "mormon weed" but he won't tell us who bought it. Me and my companion have been trying to figure out who bought it. In our apartment we have some new spanish elders and they are literally the stupidest people I have ever met, they are both the most socially awkward people I have ever met and their personalities are equivalent to that of a grape. The most entertaining thing to do out here on a mission is to mess with them or to try and bible bash with them cause they take everything that I say literally, like yesterday I told them that I was going to join the Presbyterian church and they believed me so on our way to church I stopped at the Presbyterian church and parked in the parking lot and they both just flipped out. This is about all that we have been doing this week.

Love,

Kaden